Podcast appearances and mentions of Julien Temple

This week on Shat the Movies, we're beaming up Earth Girls Are Easy (1988)! Geena Davis stars alongside a furry, neon-colored trio of aliens played by Jeff Goldblum, Jim Carrey, and Damon Wayans in this outrageously ‘80s sci-fi musical comedy. It's got big hair, wild dance numbers, and plenty of interplanetary flirting. Tune in for a fun, glitter-filled trip through one of the weirdest rom-coms of the decade! Plot SummaryIn Earth Girls Are Easy (1988), director Julien Temple crafts a neon-soaked, musical sci-fi comedy that's as weird as it is wonderful. Geena Davis stars as Valerie, a valley girl manicurist in Los Angeles whose love life hits rock bottom after discovering her fiancé is cheating. But things take a turn for the bizarre when a spaceship crash-lands in her pool, carrying three fuzzy, brightly colored aliens played by Jeff Goldblum, Jim Carrey, and Damon Wayans. After a quick makeover at the beauty salon, the aliens transform into irresistible human heartthrobs who quickly adapt to life in late-80s California. Valerie decides to help them explore the strange customs of Earth shopping malls, nightclubs, and love. As romance blossoms between Valerie and Mac (Goldblum), the film dives into fish-out-of-water antics, musical numbers, and some genuinely charming moments of connection. What makes Earth Girls Are Easy stand out is its unapologetic embrace of the absurd. The film's pastel visuals, synth-heavy soundtrack, and campy humor perfectly capture the late-80s aesthetic. Supporting performances from Julie Brown and Michael McKean add even more flair to an already offbeat cast. It's a wild mash-up of rom-com, musical, and sci-fi that doesn't take itself seriously for a second. Join our podcast as we revisit this cult classic and ask: does this intergalactic love story still sparkle, or has it crash-landed for good? From body waxing aliens to valley girl charm, we're breaking down all the glittery madness. Subscribe Now Android: https://www.shatpod.com/android Apple/iTunes: https://www.shatpod.com/apple Help Support the Podcast Contact Us: https://www.shatpod.com/contact Commission Movie: https://www.shatpod.com/support Support with Paypal: https://www.shatpod.com/paypal Support With Venmo: https://www.shatpod.com/venmo Shop Merchandise: https://www.shatpod.com/shop Theme Song - Die Hard by Guyz Nite: https://www.facebook.com/guyznite

A manicurist from The Valley dumps her cheating doctor fiance for a trio of hairy aliens in this campy sci-fi musical comedy that's better than its reputation. Starring Geena Davis, Julie Brown, Jeff Goldblum, Damon Wayans, Jim Carrey, and Charles Rocket. Written by Julie Brown, Charley Coffey, and Terrence E. McNally. Directed by Julien Temple.

Como siempre, sin periodicidad ni orden ni concierto, llega Hollyweird, nuestro análisis de artefactos culturales fantásticos, satíricos o extraños de la cultura de Los Angeles. Hoy nos sumergimos en el multicolor mundo de Julien Temple en "Las chicas de la tierra son fáciles", viajamos a la oscuridad absoluta de las memorias de Jerry Stahl, "Siempre medianoche", el tremebundo viaje de Laura Dern en "Inland Empire" de David Lynch y acabamos con la sitcom screwball "Party Down" una magnífica sátira de los que persiguen la fama.

By 1980, Judas Priest were ready to take on all the world! Fresh off their classic live album Unleashed In The East, Priest were ready to conquer America and the world with a more pop sound. Priest hit the charts with songs like Living After Midnight and Breaking The Law and offered new anthems to the teenage set with United and Metal Gods. But they stayed true to their heavy metal roots with songs like Rapid Fire and Steeler. Rob Halford shows off his chops and range on songs like The Rage as Ian Hill offers up a fun and memorable bass line. While we don't see much of the dueling solos between KK Downing and Glenn Tipton as would come to be familiar with on most of their 80s and latter day albums, they each show off their individual styles here while doing what's best for the songs. And the addition of Dave Holland on the drums solidified the classic 80s Priest lineup that would help them conquer the US and the world. They also forayed into making videos with the help of Julien Temple, much to the delight of Beavis & Butthead. This album helped propel Judas Priest and heavy metal onto a bigger stage and laid the foundation for the band's success in the 1980s and beyond. Check out our new website: Ugly American Werewolf in London Website Visit our sponsor RareVinyl.com and use the code UGLY to save 10%! Twitter Threads Instagram YouTube LInkTree www.pantheonpodcasts.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

By 1980, Judas Priest were ready to take on all the world! Fresh off their classic live album Unleashed In The East, Priest were ready to conquer America and the world with a more pop sound. Priest hit the charts with songs like Living After Midnight and Breaking The Law and offered new anthems to the teenage set with United and Metal Gods. But they stayed true to their heavy metal roots with songs like Rapid Fire and Steeler. Rob Halford shows off his chops and range on songs like The Rage as Ian Hill offers up a fun and memorable bass line. While we don't see much of the dueling solos between KK Downing and Glenn Tipton as would come to be familiar with on most of their 80s and latter day albums, they each show off their individual styles here while doing what's best for the songs. And the addition of Dave Holland on the drums solidified the classic 80s Priest lineup that would help them conquer the US and the world. They also forayed into making videos with the help of Julien Temple, much to the delight of Beavis & Butthead. This album helped propel Judas Priest and heavy metal onto a bigger stage and laid the foundation for the band's success in the 1980s and beyond. Check out our new website: Ugly American Werewolf in London Website Visit our sponsor RareVinyl.com and use the code UGLY to save 10%! Twitter Threads Instagram YouTube LInkTree www.pantheonpodcasts.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the least explored subgenres in cinema is the short-lived, radical category known as "punk film." This genre emerged in response to the rise of punk music in the late 1970s, which served as a counterpoint to the hedonistic glam of disco and dance music—a genre I also enjoy. However, punk's emergence was more than just a musical trend; it was a political reaction against the shift toward right-wing and neoliberal policies in Britain and America. Punk embraced a "DIY (Do It Yourself)" ethos that challenged the notion of expertise as an elitist barrier to creative expression. With this DIY spirit, anyone could participate and create without needing to be a skilled musician or filmmaker. Notable examples of punk cinema include Susan Seidelman's *Smithereens* (1982), Allan Moyle's *Times Square* (1980), Julien Temple's *The Great Rock and Roll Swindle* (1980), and Gregg Araki's *The Doom Generation* (1994). However, the film that arguably stands as the "Citizen Kane" of punk cinema is Alex Cox's *Repo Man* (1984). This visionary film captured the punk ethos of early 1980s Los Angeles. *Repo Man* is smart, bizarre, hilarious, and cosmic—making it one of the standout films of the underground cinema of that decade. Join Azed and Tom as they explore this remarkable work by the often-overlooked Alex Cox.

This is episode 21 in our second season of The Directors Take Podcast. In this week's episode your hosts Marcus Anthony Thomas and Oz Arshad are joined by Paul Davies, the legendary Sound Designer who is best known for being one of Director Lynne Ramsay's closest collaborators, with their relationship spanning all the way back to her first feature film, Ratcatcher. He is exceptional in his own right however and his unique style has landed him work with directors such as Stephen Frears, Yann Demange, Rose Glass, Steve McQueen and Guillermo Del Toro amongst countless others.  Sound is as important if not more so than the image itself, so we are super excited to bring you a conversation with one of the absolute best in the business. This conversation covers:   -What is Sound Design? -What was his journey into the industry like?  -The importance of mentors?  -How did he come to meet Lynne Ramsay and build that relationship?  -Why do people keep coming back to him?  -How to sync up the process between sound and the edit?  -How does he approach character and perspective with sound?  -What are the mistakes that directors make when working with sound designers?    Our wonderful sponsor for this episode is THE NATIONAL FILM and TELEVISION SCHOOL. We've also partnered with SCRIPTATION to offer our listeners an EXCLUSIVE DISCOUNT on their software, which you can find on the link below…  http://scriptation.com/thedirectorstake    Paul's Bio With a background in music recording and composition, Paul Davies graduated from the sound department at the National Film and Television School (UK) in 1993. After graduation Paul worked as a freelance sound record recordist, sound editor and re-recording mixer on a variety of feature, broadcast, and corporate projects. In 1995 Paul joined the sound post production company VideoSonics as a sound editor, rising to become head of the sound editorial department. Whilst with VideoSonics Paul continued to hone his craft on a large range of feature film and television dramas. In 2000 Paul left VideoSonics to become a freelance supervising sound editor and Sound Designer and continues to work in these roles to this day. Notable directors he has with with include Stephen Frears, John Hillcoat, Lynne Ramsay, Guillermo Del Toro, Steve McQueen, Hideo Nakata, Rose Glass, Bart Layton, Anton Corijn, Saul Dibb, Julian Jarrold, Nick Broomfield and Julien Temple amongst many others, on films such as The Queen, Kinky Boots, You Were Never Really HEre, American Animals, Hunger, Mrs HEnderson Presents, The American, The Proposition, We need to Talk about Kevin, Saint Maud and Mogul Mowgli.    In addition to his work in sound production, Paul is a regular visiting tutor at the National Film and Television School in the UK The Baltic Film School in Estonia and the IFS in Cologne. Paul has also held Sound Design workshops at the School of sound, BAFTA, CPH Dox Festival-Denmark and The Sound of Story in Brighton UK. Paul is a voting member of BAFTA and AMPAS and a past chair of AMPS the UK's film and television sound craft guild. Paul has received nominations from BAFTA and The Royal Television Society for his sound design work in 2018, and won a BIFA for his Sound Design in You Were Never Really Here.    Nugget of the week   Paul: Beth Gibbons - Portishead lead singer & the strength of performance. Oz: Godzilla Minus One Marcus: How Liquid Death's Founder Started a $700million Water Brand | Found Effect   Credits Music by Oliver Wegmüller   Socials Paul Davies: Twitter (X) & Instagram The Directors' Take: Twitter (X) & Instagram Marcus: Twitter (X) & Instagram Oz: Twitter (X) & Instagram   If you have any questions relating to the episode or have topics you would like covering in future releases, reach out to us at TheDirectorsTake@Outlook.com

Julien Temple, director of The Great Rock n Roll Swindle, Glastonbury and Absolute Beginners, chooses Christopher Marlowe, writer of brilliant plays including Doctor Faustus and Tamburlaine the Great. "I'm excited to talk about him," he says, "because I've known him for more than 50 years." The link? An attempt as a student to summon up Marlowe in his old college cellar room.Christopher Marlowe was born in 1564 - the same year as Shakespeare. He was a spy, a writer, a counterfeiter .. and he famously died in a bar room brawl in Deptford in 1593. Was it an accident, or was he killed deliberately? Helping us negotiate the mythic moments of Marlowe's life is Professor of Shakespeare studies Emma Smith.Julien Temple's film credits include The Filth and the Fury, Pandaemonium, Earth Girls are Easy and Joe Strummer: The Futureis UnwrittenThe presenter is Matthew Parris, the producer in Bristol for BBC Studios is Miles Warde

The great Miriam Margolyes chooses Charles Dickens, author of Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol."He's the man in my life. He's tugged me into his world and never let me go. He writes better prose than anyone who's ever lived. He's told the most interesting stories, invented 2000 of the best characters, and because he was a wicked man." Miriam Margolyes is author of Oh Miriam! Helping the award-winning actor and chat show terror explore the wicked life of Charles Dickens is Professor Kathryn Hughes, author of Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum. Programme includes archive of Simon Callow and Armando Iannucci.Future episodes include Reginald D Hunter on Eugene V Debs, five times socialist candidate for the US presidency; Dr Hannah Critchlow on Colin Blakemore; director Julien Temple on Christopher Marlowe, and Zing Tsjeng on Hilma af Klint, a Swedish painter who was virtually unknown throughout the twentieth century. Her recent Paintings for the Future show at the Guggenheim was the most visited in their history. Also Conn Iggulden on the Emperor Nero, and comedian Jo Brand picks the American blues singer Bessie Smith.PLUS!AN Wilson on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; Anneka Rice on the largely forgotten wife of William Morris; and Ekow Eshun on Britain's first openly gay footballer, Justin FashanuThe presenter is Matthew Parris and the producer for BBC studios is Miles Warde who launched the series over twenty years ago in Bristol.

Jeff Goldblum, people! Turns out, the big fella isn't necessarily a lure for Hannah and Jen, so will they find anything else to like in Julien Temple's American-science-fiction-musical-romantic comedy? And yes, of course it was Mick who picked it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's episode is about "Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten", from 2007, directed by Julien Temple. Our guest today is Elizabeth Nelson of the band The Paranoid Style. Check out their outstanding new album The Interrogator: https://theparanoidstyle.bandcamp.com/album/the-interrogator Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten is more of a wake for the then-recently departed punk rock legend than a by-the-books rock doc. Many of Joe's family, friends, musical compatriots, actor and director pals, and other partners in crime gather around various campfires to tell Strummer stories. The movie does go through his biography in a more or less linear fashion, but it's not an "everything you ever wanted to know about The Clash" kind of doc. You come away from the movie feeling like you know Joe Strummer, but that he was also unknowable even to those closest to him. Rock Docs is a Treble Media Podcast hosted by David Lizerbram & Andrew Keatts Twitter: @RockDocsPod   Instagram: @RockDocsPod   Cover Art by N.C. Winters - check him out on Instagram at @NCWintersArt  

Another week another weird ass movie! This week we Talk about Earth girls are easy from 1988! Our creator profile this week is the equally as odd Jeff Goldblum! https://twitter.com/bonsai_crewhttps://www.tiktok.com/@thebonsaimoviecrewhttps://discord.gg/8jCPe8T2kT

Earth Girls Are Easy is a 1988 science fiction comedy film directed by famed music video director Julien Temple, and written by comedian/singer Julie Brown. Based off of a song previously released by Brown, the action follows a trio of space aliens landing upon Earth, and finding themselves under the care of a lovelorn manicurist in California. The film follows the group's efforts to blend in with the rest of humanity and eventually fix their crashed spaceship. It featured acting roles from Geena Davis, Jeff Goldblum, Charles Rocket, Michael McKean, Julie Brown herself, and early performances from Jim Carrey and Damon Wayans, while also featuring music by legendary disco musician Nile Rodgers. Though not a major commercial success, the film has developed a devoted cult following over the years.On a new episode of Hell Is A Musical, Lilz and Scott welcome back all-star guest Ashley Rogers to the program for a screening of Earth Girls Are Easy. (Which we're only kinda sure counts as a musical in the first place?) Join them as Scott expounds upon the film's connection of golden age movie musicals, Ashley draws paralells between the film and the works of Bertol Brecht, and Lilz is thoroughly confused by whatever Angelyne's whole deal was....with Lilz and Scott!

con Marco D'Amore ospite in studio per parlare del suo ultimo film "Caracas" e non solo. Intervista a Claudia Cipriani sul documentario dedicato alla figura di Carlo Giuliani "Di vita non si muore". Julien Temple al microfono di Cecilia Paesante. Tra le uscite: "Dune - Parte2" di Denis Villeneuve; "Estranei" di Andrew High; "La sala professori" di Ilker Catak; "L'Avamposto" di Edoardo Morabito.

Reel Britannia - a very British podcast about very British movies...with just a hint of professionalism   This week, Scott and Steven are joined by Mark from The Good The Bad and The Odd podcast to chat about, not Hammer horror this time, but Julien Temple's musical from 1986 starring Patsy Kensit and David Bowie   Absolute Beginners (1986)   A musical adaptation of Colin MacInnes' novel about life in late 1950s London. Nineteen-year-old photographer Colin is hopelessly in love with model Crepe Suzette, but her relationships are strictly connected with her progress in the fashion world. So Colin gets involved with a pop promoter and tries to crack the big time. Meanwhile, racial tension is brewing in Colin's Notting Hill housing estate...     You can find this and all our previous episodes everywhere you download your podcasts   Follow us on Twitter @rbritanniapod   email: reelbritannia@gmail.com   #podcast #britmovie #reelbritannia #davidbowie   Thanks for listening   Scott, Steven and Mark  

Welcome to The 80's Montage! (music, mateys and cool shit from the 80s) Your Hosts Jay Jovi & Sammy HardOn, singers from Australian 80's tribute band Rewind 80's. We take you back to living in the 80's: music, artists, TV commercials and video clips.  Episode 197: Film(ic) Clips - Music Videos That Were Movies It's a ripper! Please rate, review and enjoy! Music licensed by APRA/AMCOS Theme music ©2019 M. Skerman. Produced & edited by Matty Ray. See Facebook for links to videos & songs mentioned in this episode! Email: planet80sproductions@gmail.com Rewind 80's Band: www.rewind80sband.com Facebook: the80smontagepodcast twitter: 80_montage instagram: the80smontage Links from Episode 197: Film(ic) Clips - Music Videos That Were MoviesPatreon Link With Thanks x https://www.patreon.com/the80smontagepodcast Rewind 80's Band - www.rewind80sband.comTickets - www.rewind80smixtape.com.auSaturday 21st October 2023 - Northcote Theatre from 7pmSaturday 28th October 2023 - GV in SheppartonSaturday 11th November 2023 - Commercial Hotel - South MorangSaturday  25th November 2023 - Macs Hotel - MeltonSaturday 2nd December 2023 - Cardinia Cultural Centre - PakenhamBookings - samantha@planet80s.com.auPlease Subscribe, Like, Share, Rate (Itunes please)Thank you to Leith for being our Patreon Music Trivia Guest. Your support in coming to gigs & patreon are appreciated..

Our month of requests wraps up with one from our mutual pal Andy Hendrickson, it's Julien Temple's Bullet from 1996. The film stars Mickey Rourke as the titular Bullet, an ex-con back on the streets and reunited with his dysfunctional family. Or is the movie really about Bullet's brother, Ruby, played by Adrien Brody?Chris Stachiw and Father Malone join Mike to discuss the film while co-screenwriter Bruce Rubenstein (the inspiration for Ruby) spills the beans about the making of Bullet.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/show/the-projection-booth-podcast_2/support.This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/5513239/advertisement

Our month of requests wraps up with one from our mutual pal Andy Hendrickson, it's Julien Temple's Bullet from 1996. The film stars Mickey Rourke as the titular Bullet, an ex-con back on the streets and reunited with his dysfunctional family. Or is the movie really about Bullet's brother, Ruby, played by Adrien Brody?Chris Stachiw and Father Malone join Mike to discuss the film while co-screenwriter Bruce Rubenstein (the inspiration for Ruby) spills the beans about the making of Bullet.This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/5513239/advertisement

We continue our miniseries on the 1980s movies distributed by Miramax Films, with a look at the films released in 1988. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT   From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it's The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.   On this episode, we finally continue with the next part of our look back at the 1980s movies distributed by Miramax Films, specifically looking at 1988.   But before we get there, I must issue another mea culpa. In our episode on the 1987 movies from Miramax, I mentioned that a Kiefer Sutherland movie called Crazy Moon never played in another theatre after its disastrous one week Oscar qualifying run in Los Angeles in December 1987.   I was wrong.   While doing research on this episode, I found one New York City playdate for the film, in early February 1988. It grossed a very dismal $3200 at the 545 seat Festival Theatre during its first weekend, and would be gone after seven days.   Sorry for the misinformation.   1988 would be a watershed year for the company, as one of the movies they acquired for distribution would change the course of documentary filmmaking as we knew it, and another would give a much beloved actor his first Academy Award nomination while giving the company its first Oscar win.   But before we get to those two movies, there's a whole bunch of others to talk about first.   Of the twelve movies Miramax would release in 1988, only four were from America. The rest would be a from a mixture of mostly Anglo-Saxon countries like the UK, Canada, France and Sweden, although there would be one Spanish film in there.   Their first release of the new year, Le Grand Chemin, told the story of a timid nine-year-old boy from Paris who spends one summer vacation in a small town in Brittany. His mother has lodged the boy with her friend and her friend's husband while Mom has another baby. The boy makes friends with a slightly older girl next door, and learns about life from her.   Richard Bohringer, who plays the friend's husband, and Anémone, who plays the pregnant mother, both won Cesars, the French equivalent to the Oscars, in their respective lead categories, and the film would be nominated for Best Foreign Language Film of 1987 by the National Board of Review. Miramax, who had picked up the film at Cannes several months earlier, waited until January 22nd, 1988, to release it in America, first at the Paris Theatre in midtown Manhattan, where it would gross a very impressive $41k in its first three days. In its second week, it would drop less than 25% of its opening weekend audience, bringing in another $31k. But shortly after that, the expected Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film did not come, and business on the film slowed to a trickle. But it kept chugging on, and by the time the film finished its run in early June, it had grossed $541k.   A week later, on January 29th, Miramax would open another French film, Light Years. An animated science fiction film written and directed by René Laloux, best known for directing the 1973 animated head trip film Fantastic Planet, Light Years was the story of an evil force from a thousand years in the future who begins to destroy an idyllic paradise where the citizens are in perfect harmony with nature.   In its first three days at two screens in Los Angeles and five screens in the San Francisco Bay Area, Light Years would gross a decent $48,665. Miramax would print a self-congratulating ad in that week's Variety touting the film's success, and thanking Isaac Asimov, who helped to write the English translation, and many of the actors who lent their vocal talents to the new dub, including Glenn Close, Bridget Fonda, Jennifer Grey, Christopher Plummer, and Penn and Teller. Yes, Teller speaks. The ad was a message to both the theatre operators and the major players in the industry. Miramax was here. Get used to it.   But that ad may have been a bit premature.   While the film would do well in major markets during its initial week in theatres, audience interest would drop outside of its opening week in big cities, and be practically non-existent in college towns and other smaller cities. Its final box office total would be just over $370k.   March 18th saw the release of a truly unique film.    Imagine a film directed by Robert Altman and Bruce Beresford and Jean-Luc Godard and Derek Jarman and Franc Roddam and Nicolas Roeg and Ken Russell and Charles Sturridge and Julien Temple. Imagine a film that starred Beverly D'Angelo, Bridget Fonda in her first movie, Julie Hagerty, Buck Henry, Elizabeth Hurley and John Hurt and Theresa Russell and Tilda Swinton. Imagine a film that brought together ten of the most eclectic filmmakers in the world doing four to fourteen minute short films featuring the arias of some of the most famous and beloved operas ever written, often taken out of their original context and placed into strange new places. Like, for example, the aria for Verdi's Rigoletto set at the kitschy Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo, where a movie producer is cheating on his wife while she is in a nearby room with a hunky man who is not her husband. Imagine that there's almost no dialogue in the film. Just the arias to set the moments.   That is Aria.   If you are unfamiliar with opera in general, and these arias specifically, that's not a problem. When I saw the film at the Nickelodeon Theatre in Santa Cruz in June 1988, I knew some Wagner, some Puccini, and some Verdi, through other movies that used the music as punctuation for a scene. I think the first time I had heard Nessun Dorma was in The Killing Fields. Vesti La Giubba in The Untouchables. But this would be the first time I would hear these arias as they were meant to be performed, even if they were out of context within their original stories. Certainly, Wagner didn't intend the aria from Tristan und Isolde to be used to highlight a suicide pact between a young couple killing themselves in a Las Vegas hotel bathroom.   Aria definitely split critics when it premiered at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival, when it competed for the festival's main prize, the Palme D'Or. Roger Ebert would call it the first MTV opera and felt the filmmakers were poking fun at their own styles, while Leonard Maltin felt most of the endeavor was a waste of time. In the review for the New York Times, Janet Maslin would also make a reference to MTV but not in a positive way, and would note the two best parts of the film were the photo montage that is seen over the end credits, and the clever licensing of Chuck Jones's classic Bugs Bunny cartoon What's Opera, Doc, to play with the film, at least during its New York run. In the Los Angeles Times, the newspaper chose one of its music critics to review the film. They too would compare the film to MTV, but also to Fantasia, neither reference meant to be positive.   It's easy to see what might have attracted Harvey Weinstein to acquire the film.   Nudity.   And lots of it.   Including from a 21 year old Hurley, and a 22 year old Fonda.   Open at the 420 seat Ridgemont Theatre in Seattle on March 18th, 1988, Aria would gross a respectable $10,600. It would be the second highest grossing theatre in the city, only behind The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which grossed $16,600 in its fifth week at the 850 seat Cinerama Theatre, which was and still is the single best theatre in Seattle. It would continue to do well in Seattle, but it would not open until April 15th in Los Angeles and May 20th in New York City.   But despite some decent notices and the presence of some big name directors, Aria would stiff at the box office, grossing just $1.03m after seven months in theatres.   As we discussed on our previous episode, there was a Dennis Hopper movie called Riders on the Storm that supposedly opened in November 1987, but didn't. It did open in theatres in May of 1988, and now we're here to talk about it.   Riders on the Storm would open in eleven theatres in the New York City area on May 7th, including three theatres in Manhattan. Since Miramax did not screen the film for critics before release, never a good sign, the first reviews wouldn't show up until the following day, since the critics would actually have to go see the film with a regular audience. Vincent Canby's review for the New York Times would arrive first, and surprisingly, he didn't completely hate the film. But audiences didn't care. In its first weekend in New York City, Riders on the Storm would gross an anemic $25k. The following Friday, Miramax would open the film at two theatres in Baltimore, four theatres in Fort Worth TX (but surprisingly none in Dallas), one theatre in Los Angeles and one theatre in Springfield OH, while continuing on only one screen in New York. No reported grosses from Fort Worth, LA or Springfield, but the New York theatre reported ticket sales of $3k for the weekend, a 57% drop from its previous week, while the two in Baltimore combined for $5k.   There would be more single playdates for a few months. Tampa the same week as New York. Atlanta, Charlotte, Des Moines and Memphis in late May. Cincinnati in late June. Boston, Calgary, Ottawa and Philadelphia in early July. Greenville SC in late August. Evansville IL, Ithaca NY and San Francisco in early September. Chicago in late September. It just kept popping up in random places for months, always a one week playdate before heading off to the next location. And in all that time, Miramax never reported grosses. What little numbers we do have is from the theatres that Variety was tracking, and those numbers totaled up to less than $30k.   Another mostly lost and forgotten Miramax release from 1988 is Caribe, a Canadian production that shot in Belize about an amateur illegal arms trader to Central American terrorists who must go on the run after a deal goes down bad, because who wants to see a Canadian movie about an amateur illegal arms trader to Canadian terrorists who must go on the run in the Canadian tundra after a deal goes down bad?   Kara Glover would play Helen, the arms dealer, and John Savage as Jeff, a British intelligence agent who helps Helen.   Caribe would first open in Detroit on May 20th, 1988. Can you guess what I'm going to say next?   Yep.   No reported grosses, no theatres playing the film tracked by Variety.   The following week, Caribe opens in the San Francisco Bay Area, at the 300 seat United Artists Theatre in San Francisco, and three theatres in the South Bay. While Miramax once again did not report grosses, the combined gross for the four theatres, according to Variety, was a weak $3,700. Compare that to Aria, which was playing at the Opera Plaza Cinemas in its third week in San Francisco, in an auditorium 40% smaller than the United Artist, grossing $5,300 on its own.   On June 3rd, Caribe would open at the AMC Fountain Square 14 in Nashville. One show only on Friday and Saturday at 11:45pm. Miramax did not report grosses. Probably because people we going to see Willie Tyler and Lester at Zanie's down the street.   And again, it kept cycling around the country, one or two new playdates in each city it played in. Philadelphia in mid-June. Indianapolis in mid-July. Jersey City in late August. Always for one week, grosses never reported.   Miramax's first Swedish release of the year was called Mio, but this was truly an international production. The $4m film was co-produced by Swedish, Norwegian and Russian production companies, directed by a Russian, adapted from a Swedish book by an American screenwriter, scored by one of the members of ABBA, and starring actors from England, Finland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the United States.   Mio tells the story of a boy from Stockholm who travels to an otherworldly fantasy realm and frees the land from an evil knight's oppression. What makes this movie memorable today is that Mio's best friend is played by none other than Christian Bale, in his very first film.   The movie was shot in Moscow, Stockholm, the Crimea, Scotland, and outside Pripyat in the Northern part of what is now Ukraine, between March and July 1986. In fact, the cast and crew were shooting outside Pripyat on April 26th, when they got the call they needed to evacuate the area. It would be hours later when they would discover there had been a reactor core meltdown at the nearby Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. They would have to scramble to shoot in other locations away from Ukraine for a month, and when they were finally allowed to return, the area they were shooting in deemed to have not been adversely affected by the worst nuclear power plant accident in human history,, Geiger counters would be placed all over the sets, and every meal served by craft services would need to be read to make sure it wasn't contaminated.   After premiering at the Moscow Film Festival in July 1987 and the Norwegian Film Festival in August, Mio would open in Sweden on October 16th, 1987. The local critics would tear the film apart. They hated that the filmmakers had Anglicized the movie with British actors like Christopher Lee, Susannah York, Christian Bale and Nicholas Pickard, an eleven year old boy also making his film debut. They also hated how the filmmakers adapted the novel by the legendary Astrid Lindgren, whose Pippi Longstocking novels made her and her works world famous. Overall, they hated pretty much everything about it outside of Christopher Lee's performance and the production's design in the fantasy world.   Miramax most likely picked it up trying to emulate the success of The Neverending Story, which had opened to great success in most of the world in 1984. So it might seem kinda odd that when they would open the now titled The Land of Faraway in theatres, they wouldn't go wide but instead open it on one screen in Atlanta GA on June 10th, 1988. And, once again, Miramax did not report grosses, and Variety did not track Atlanta theatres that week. Two weeks later, they would open the film in Miami. How many theatres? Can't tell you. Miramax did not report grosses, and Variety was not tracking any of the theatres in Miami playing the film. But hey, Bull Durham did pretty good in Miami that week.   The film would next open in theatres in Los Angeles. This time, Miramax bought a quarter page ad in the Los Angeles Times on opening day to let people know the film existed. So we know it was playing on 18 screens that weekend. And, once again, Miramax did not report grosses for the film. But on the two screens it played on that Variety was tracking, the combined gross was just $2,500.   There'd be other playdates. Kansas City and Minneapolis in mid-September. Vancouver, BC in early October. Palm Beach FL in mid October. Calgary AB and Fort Lauderdale in late October. Phoenix in mid November. And never once did Miramax report any grosses for it.   One week after Mio, Miramax would release a comedy called Going Undercover.   Now, if you listened to our March 2021 episode on Some Kind of Wonderful, you may remember be mentioning Lea Thompson taking the role of Amanda Jones in that film, a role she had turned down twice before, the week after Howard the Duck opened, because she was afraid she'd never get cast in a movie again. And while Some Kind of Wonderful wasn't as big a film as you'd expect from a John Hughes production, Thompson did indeed continue to work, and is still working to this day.   So if you were looking at a newspaper ad in several cities in June 1988 and saw her latest movie and wonder why she went back to making weird little movies.   She hadn't.   This was a movie she had made just before Back to the Future, in August and September 1984.   Originally titled Yellow Pages, the film starred film legend Jean Simmons as Maxine, a rich woman who has hired Chris Lemmon's private investigator Henry Brilliant to protect her stepdaughter Marigold during her trip to Copenhagen.   The director, James Clarke, had written the script specifically for Lemmon, tailoring his role to mimic various roles played by his famous father, Jack Lemmon, over the decades, and for Simmons. But Thompson was just one of a number of young actresses they looked at before making their casting choice.   Half of the $6m budget would come from a first-time British film producer, while the other half from a group of Danish investors wanting to lure more Hollywood productions to their area.   The shoot would be plagued by a number of problems. The shoot in Los Angeles coincided with the final days of the 1984 Summer Olympics, which would cut out using some of the best and most regularly used locations in the city, and a long-lasting heat wave that would make outdoor shoots unbearable for cast and crew. When they arrived in Copenhagen at the end of August, Denmark was going through an unusually heavy storm front that hung around for weeks.   Clarke would spend several months editing the film, longer than usual for a smaller production like this, but he in part was waiting to see how Back to the Future would do at the box office. If the film was a hit, and his leading actress was a major part of that, it could make it easier to sell his film to a distributor.   Or that was line of thinking.   Of course, Back to the Future was a hit, and Thompson received much praise for her comedic work on the film.   But that didn't make it any easier to sell his film.   The producer would set the first screenings for the film at the February 1986 American Film Market in Santa Monica, which caters not only to foreign distributors looking to acquire American movies for their markets, but helps independent filmmakers get their movies seen by American distributors.   As these screenings were for buyers by invitation only, there would be no reviews from the screenings, but one could guess that no one would hear about the film again until Miramax bought the American distribution rights to it in March 1988 tells us that maybe those screenings didn't go so well.   The film would get retitled Going Undercover, and would open in single screen playdates in Atlanta, Cincinnati, Dallas, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Nashville, Orlando, St. Louis and Tampa on June 17th. And as I've said too many times already, no reported grosses from Miramax, and only one theatre playing the film was being tracked by Variety, with Going Undercover earning $3,000 during its one week at the Century City 14 in Los Angeles.   In the June 22nd, 1988 issue of Variety, there was an article about Miramax securing a $25m line of credit in order to start producing their own films. Going Undercover is mentioned in the article about being one of Miramax's releases, without noting it had just been released that week or how well it did or did not do.   The Thin Blue Line would be Miramax's first non-music based documentary, and one that would truly change how documentaries were made.   Errol Morris had already made two bizarre but entertaining documentaries in the late 70s and early 80s. Gates of Heaven was shot in 1977, about a man who operated a failing pet cemetery in Northern California's Napa Valley. When Morris told his famous German filmmaking supporter Werner Herzog about the film, Herzog vowed to eat one of the shoes he was wearing that day if Morris could actually complete the film and have it shown in a public theatre. In April 1979, just before the documentary had its world premiere at UC Theatre in Berkeley, where Morris had studied philosophy, Herzog would spend the morning at Chez Pannise, the creators of the California Cuisine cooking style, boiling his shoes for five hours in garlic, herbs and stock. This event itself would be commemorated in a documentary short called, naturally, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, by Les Blank, which is a must watch on its own.   Because of the success of Gates of Heaven, Morris was able to quickly find financing for his next film, Nub City, which was originally supposed to be about the number of Vernon, Florida's citizens who have “accidentally” cut off their limbs, in order to collect the insurance money. But after several of those citizens threatened to kill Morris, and one of them tried to run down his cinematographer with their truck, Morris would rework the documentary, dropping the limb angle, no pun intended, and focus on the numerous eccentric people in the town. It would premiere at the 1981 New York Film Festival, and become a hit, for a documentary, when it was released in theatres in 1982.   But it would take Morris another six years after completing Vernon, Florida, to make another film. Part of it was having trouble lining up full funding to work on his next proposed movie, about James Grigson, a Texas forensic psychiatrist whose was nicknamed Doctor Death for being an expert witness for the prosecution in death penalty cases in Texas. Morris had gotten seed money for the documentary from PBS and the Endowment for Public Arts, but there was little else coming in while he worked on the film. In fact, Morris would get a PI license in New York and work cases for two years, using every penny he earned that wasn't going towards living expenses to keep the film afloat.   One of Morris's major problems for the film was that Grigson would not sit on camera for an interview, but would meet with Morris face to face to talk about the cases. During that meeting, the good doctor suggested to the filmmaker that he should research the killers he helped put away. And during that research, Morris would come across the case of one Randall Dale Adams, who was convicted of killing Dallas police officer Robert Wood in 1976, even though another man, David Harris, was the police's initial suspect. For two years, Morris would fly back and forth between New York City and Texas, talking to and filming interviews with Adams and more than two hundred other people connected to the shooting and the trial. Morris had become convinced Adams was indeed innocent, and dropped the idea about Dr. Grigson to solely focus on the Robert Wood murder.   After showing the producers of PBS's American Playhouse some of the footage he had put together of the new direction of the film, they kicked in more funds so that Morris could shoot some re-enactment sequences outside New York City, as well as commission composer Phillip Glass to create a score for the film once it was completed. Documentaries at that time did not regularly use re-enactments, but Morris felt it was important to show how different personal accounts of the same moment can be misinterpreted or misremembered or outright manipulated to suppress the truth.   After the film completed its post-production in March 1988, The Thin Blue Line would have its world premiere at the San Francisco Film Festival on March 18th, and word quickly spread Morris had something truly unique and special on his hands. The critic for Variety would note in the very first paragraph of his write up that the film employed “strikingly original formal devices to pull together diverse interviews, film clips, photo collages, and” and this is where it broke ground, “recreations of the crime from many points of view.”   Miramax would put together a full court press in order to get the rights to the film, which was announced during the opening days of the 1988 Cannes Film Festival in early May. An early hint on how the company was going to sell the film was by calling it a “non-fiction feature” instead of a documentary.   Miramax would send Morris out on a cross-country press tour in the weeks leading up to the film's August 26th opening date, but Morris, like many documentary filmmakers, was not used to being in the spotlight themselves, and was not as articulate about talking up his movies as the more seasoned directors and actors who've been on the promotion circuit for a while. After one interview, Harvey Weinstein would send Errol Morris a note.   “Heard your NPR interview and you were boring.”   Harvey would offer up several suggestions to help the filmmaker, including hyping the movie up as a real life mystery thriller rather than a documentary, and using shorter and clearer sentences when answering a question.   It was a clear gamble to release The Thin Blue Line in the final week of summer, and the film would need a lot of good will to stand out.   And it would get it.   The New York Times was so enthralled with the film, it would not only run a review from Janet Maslin, who would heap great praise on the film, but would also run a lengthy interview with Errol Morris right next to the review. The quarter page ad in the New York Times, several pages back, would tout positive quotes from Roger Ebert, J. Hoberman, who had left The Village Voice for the then-new Premiere Magazine, Peter Travers, writing for People Magazine instead of Rolling Stone, and critics from the San Francisco Chronicle and, interestingly enough, the Dallas Morning News. The top of the ad was tagged with an intriguing tease: solving this mystery is going to be murder, with a second tag line underneath the key art and title, which called the film “a new kind of movie mystery.” Of the 15 New York area-based film critics for local newspapers, television and national magazines, 14 of them gave favorable reviews, while 1, Stephen Schiff of Vanity Fair, was ambivalent about it. Not one critic gave it a bad review.   New York audiences were hooked.   Opening in the 240 seat main house at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, the movie grossed $30,945 its first three days. In its second weekend, the gross at the Lincoln Plaza would jump to $31k, and adding another $27,500 from its two theatre opening in Los Angeles and $15,800 from a single DC theatre that week. Third week in New York was a still good $21k, but the second week in Los Angeles fell to $10,500 and DC to $10k. And that's how it rolled out for several months, mostly single screen bookings in major cities not called Los Angeles or New York City, racking up some of the best reviews Miramax would receive to date, but never breaking out much outside the major cities. When it looked like Santa Cruz wasn't going to play the film, I drove to San Francisco to see it, just as my friends and I had for the opening day of Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ in mid-August. That's 75 miles each way, plus parking in San Francisco, just to see a movie. That's when you know you no longer just like movies but have developed a serious case of cinephilea. So when The Nickelodeon did open the film in late November, I did something I had never done with any documentary before.   I went and saw it again.   Second time around, I was still pissed off at the outrageous injustice heaped upon Randall Dale Adams for nothing more than being with and trusting the wrong person at the wrong time. But, thankfully, things would turn around for Adams in the coming weeks. On December 1st, it was reported that David Harris had recanted his testimony at Adams' trial, admitting he was alone when Officer Wood stopped his car. And on March 1st, 1989, after more than 15,000 people had signed the film's petition to revisit the decision, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned Adams's conviction “based largely” on facts presented in the film.   The film would also find itself in several more controversies.   Despite being named The Best Documentary of the Year by a number of critics groups, the Documentary Branch of the  Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences would not nominate the film, due in large part to the numerous reenactments presented throughout the film. Filmmaker Michael Apted, a member of the Directors Branch of the Academy, noted that the failure to acknowledge The Thin Blue Line was “one of the most outrageous things in the modern history of the Academy,” while Roger Ebert added the slight was “the worst non-nomination of the year.” Despite the lack of a nomination, Errol Morris would attend the Oscars ceremony in March 1989, as a protest for his film being snubbed.   Morris would also, several months after Adams' release, find himself being sued by Adams, but not because of how he was portrayed in the film. During the making of the film, Morris had Adams sign a contract giving Morris the exclusive right to tell Adams's story, and Adams wanted, essentially, the right to tell his own story now that he was a free man. Morris and Adams would settle out of court, and Adams would regain his life rights.   Once the movie was played out in theatres, it had grossed $1.2m, which on the surface sounds like not a whole lot of money. Adjusted for inflation, that would only be $3.08m. But even unadjusted for inflation, it's still one of the 100 highest grossing documentaries of the past forty years. And it is one of just a handful of documentaries to become a part of the National Film Registry, for being a culturally, historically or aesthetically significant film.”   Adams would live a quiet life after his release, working as an anti-death penalty advocate and marrying the sister of one of the death row inmates he was helping to exonerate. He would pass away from a brain tumor in October 2010 at a courthouse in Ohio not half an hour from where he was born and still lived, but he would so disappear from the spotlight after the movie was released that his passing wasn't even reported until June 2011.   Errol Morris would become one of the most celebrated documentarians of his generation, finally getting nominated for, and winning, an Oscar in 2003, for The Fog of War, about the life and times of Robert McNamara, Richard Nixon's Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War era. The Fog of War would also be added to the National Film Registry in 2019. Morris would become only the third documentarian, after D.A. Pennebaker and Les Blank, to have two films on the Registry.   In 1973, the senseless killings of five members of the Alday family in Donalsonville GA made international headlines. Four years later, Canadian documentarian Tex Fuller made an award-winning documentary about the case, called Murder One. For years, Fuller shopped around a screenplay telling the same story, but it would take nearly a decade for it to finally be sold, in part because Fuller was insistent that he also be the director. A small Canadian production company would fund the $1m CAD production, which would star Henry Thomas of E.T. fame as the fifteen year old narrator of the story, Billy Isaacs.   The shoot began in early October 1987 outside Toronto, but after a week of shooting, Fuller was fired, and was replaced by Graeme Campbell, a young and energetic filmmaker for whom Murder One would be his fourth movie directing gig of the year. Details are sketchy as to why Fuller was fired, but Thomas and his mother Carolyn would voice concerns with the producers about the new direction the film was taking under its new director.   The film would premiere in Canada in May 1988. When the film did well up North, Miramax took notice and purchased the American distribution rights.   Murder One would first open in America on two screens in Los Angeles on September 9th, 1988. Michael Wilmington of the Los Angeles Times noted that while the film itself wasn't very good, that it still sprung from the disturbing insight about the crazy reasons people cross of what should be impassable moral lines.   “No movie studio could have invented it!,” screamed the tagline on the poster and newspaper key art. “No writer could have imagined it! Because what happened that night became the most controversial in American history.”   That would draw limited interest from filmgoers in Tinseltown. The two theatres would gross a combined $7k in its first three days. Not great but far better than several other recent Miramax releases in the area.   Two weeks later, on September 23rd, Miramax would book Murder One into 20 theatres in the New York City metro region, as well as in Akron, Atlanta, Charlotte, Indianpolis, Nashville, and Tampa-St. Petersburg. In New York, the film would actually get some good reviews from the Times and the Post as well as Peter Travers of People Magazine, but once again, Miramax would not report grosses for the film. Variety would note the combined gross for the film in New York City was only $25k.   In early October, the film would fall out of Variety's internal list of the 50 Top Grossing Films within the twenty markets they regularly tracked, with a final gross of just $87k. One market that Miramax deliberately did not book the film was anywhere near southwest Georgia, where the murders took place. The closest theatre that did play the film was more than 200 miles away.   Miramax would finish 1988 with two releases.   The first was Dakota, which would mark star Lou Diamond Phillips first time as a producer. He would star as a troubled teenager who takes a job on a Texas horse ranch to help pay of his debts, who becomes a sorta big brother to the ranch owner's young son, who has recently lost a leg to cancer, as he also falls for the rancher's daughter.   When the $1.1m budgeted film began production in Texas in June 1987, Phillips had already made La Bamba and Stand and Deliver, but neither had yet to be released into theatres. By the time filming ended five weeks later, La Bamba had just opened, and Phillips was on his way to becoming a star.   The main producers wanted director Fred Holmes to get the film through post-production as quickly as possible, to get it into theatres in the early part of 1988 to capitalize on the newfound success of their young star.    But that wouldn't happen.   Holmes wouldn't have the film ready until the end of February 1988, which was deemed acceptable because of the impending release of Stand and Deliver. In fact, the producers would schedule their first distributor screening of the film on March 14th, the Monday after Stand and Delivered opened, in the hopes that good box office for the film and good notices for Phillips would translate to higher distributor interest in their film, which sorta worked. None of the major studios would show for the screening, but a number of Indies would, including Miramax. Phillips would not attend the screening, as he was on location in New Mexico shooting Young Guns.   I can't find any reason why Miramax waited nearly nine months after they acquired Dakota to get it into theatres. It certainly wasn't Oscar bait, and screen availability would be scarce during the busy holiday movie season, which would see a number of popular, high profile releases like Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Ernest Saves Christmas, The Naked Gun, Rain Man, Scrooged, Tequila Sunrise, Twins and Working Girl. Which might explain why, when Miramax released the film into 18 theatres in the New York City area on December 2nd, they could only get three screens in all of Manhattan, the best being the nice but hardly first-rate Embassy 4 at Broadway and 47th. Or of the 22 screens in Los Angeles opening the film the same day, the best would be the tiny Westwood 4 next to UCLA or the Paramount in Hollywood, whose best days were back in the Eisenhower administration.   And, yet again, Miramax did not report grosses, and none of the theatres playing the film was tracked by Variety that week. The film would be gone after just one week. The Paramount, which would open Dirty Rotten Scoundrels on the 14th, opted to instead play a double feature of Clara's Heart, with Whoopi Goldberg and Neil Patrick Harris, and the River Phoenix drama Running on Empty, even though neither film had been much of a hit.   Miramax's last film of the year would be the one that changed everything for them.   Pelle the Conquerer.   Adapted from a 1910 Danish book and directed by Billie August, whose previous film Twist and Shout had been released by Miramax in 1986, Pelle the Conquerer would be the first Danish or Swedish movie to star Max von Sydow in almost 15 years, having spent most of the 70s and 80s in Hollywood and London starring in a number of major movies including The Exorcist, Three Days of the Condor, Flash Gordon,Conan the Barbarian, Never Say Never Again, and David Lynch's Dune. But because von Sydow would be making his return to his native cinema, August was able to secure $4.5m to make the film, one of the highest budgeted Scandinavian films to be made to date.   In the late 1850s, an elderly emigrant Lasse and his son Pelle leave their home in Sweden after the death of the boy's mother, wanting to build a new life on the Danish island of Bornholm. Lasse finds it difficult to find work, given his age and his son's youth. The pair are forced to work at a large farm, where they are generally mistreated by the managers for being foreigners. The father falls into depression and alcoholism, the young boy befriends one of the bastard children of the farm owner as well as another Swedish farm worker, who dreams of conquering the world.   For the title character of Pelle, Billie August saw more than 3,000 Swedish boys before deciding to cast 11 year old Pelle Hvenegaard, who, like many boys in Sweden, had been named for the character he was now going to play on screen.   After six months of filming in the summer and fall of 1986, Billie August would finish editing Pelle the Conquerer in time for it to make its intended Christmas Day 1987 release date in Denmark and Sweden, where the film would be one of the biggest releases in either country for the entire decade. It would make its debut outside Scandinavia at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1988, where it had been invited to compete for the Palme D'Or. It would compete against a number of talented filmmakers who had come with some of the best films they would ever make, including Clint Eastwood with Bird, Claire Denis' Chocolat, István Szabó's Hanussen, Vincent Ward's The Navigator, and A Short Film About Killing, an expanded movie version of the fifth episode in Krzysztof Kieślowski's masterful miniseries Dekalog. Pelle would conquer them all, taking home the top prize from one of cinema's most revered film festivals.   Reviews for the film out of Cannes were almost universally excellent. Vincent Canby, the lead film critic for the New York Times for nearly twenty years by this point, wouldn't file his review until the end of the festival, in which he pointed out that a number of people at the festival were scandalized von Sydow had not also won the award for Best Actor.   Having previously worked with the company on his previous film's American release, August felt that Miramax would have what it took to make the film a success in the States.   Their first moves would be to schedule the film for a late December release, while securing a slot at that September's New York Film Festival. And once again, the critical consensus was highly positive, with only a small sampling of distractors.   The film would open first on two screens at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas in midtown Manhattan on Wednesday, December 21st, following by exclusive engagements in nine other cities including Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington DC, on the 23rd. But the opening week numbers weren't very good, just $46k from ten screens. And you can't really blame the film's two hour and forty-five minute running time. Little Dorrit, the two-part, four hour adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel, had been out nine weeks at this point and was still making nearly 50% more per screen.   But after the new year, when more and more awards were hurled the film's way, including the National Board of Review naming it one of the best foreign films of the year and the Golden Globes awarding it their Best Foreign Language trophy, ticket sales would pick up.   Well, for a foreign film.   The week after the Motion Picture Academy awarded Pelle their award for Best Foreign Language Film, business for the film would pick up 35%, and a third of its $2m American gross would come after that win.   One of the things that surprised me while doing the research for this episode was learning that Max von Sydow had never been nominated for an Oscar until he was nominated for Best Actor for Pelle the Conquerer. You look at his credits over the years, and it's just mind blowing. The Seventh Seal. Wild Strawberries. The Virgin Spring. The Greatest Story Ever Told. The Emigrants. The Exorcist. The Three Days of the Condor. Surely there was one performance amongst those that deserved recognition.   I hate to keep going back to A24, but there's something about a company's first Oscar win that sends that company into the next level. A24 didn't really become A24 until 2016, when three of their movies won Oscars, including Brie Larson for Best Actress in Room. And Miramax didn't really become the Miramax we knew and once loved until its win for Pelle.   Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again soon, when Episode 117, the fifth and final part of our miniseries on Miramax Films, is released.     Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about the movies we covered this episode.   The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.   Thank you again.   Good night.

We continue our miniseries on the 1980s movies distributed by Miramax Films, with a look at the films released in 1988. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT   From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it's The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.   On this episode, we finally continue with the next part of our look back at the 1980s movies distributed by Miramax Films, specifically looking at 1988.   But before we get there, I must issue another mea culpa. In our episode on the 1987 movies from Miramax, I mentioned that a Kiefer Sutherland movie called Crazy Moon never played in another theatre after its disastrous one week Oscar qualifying run in Los Angeles in December 1987.   I was wrong.   While doing research on this episode, I found one New York City playdate for the film, in early February 1988. It grossed a very dismal $3200 at the 545 seat Festival Theatre during its first weekend, and would be gone after seven days.   Sorry for the misinformation.   1988 would be a watershed year for the company, as one of the movies they acquired for distribution would change the course of documentary filmmaking as we knew it, and another would give a much beloved actor his first Academy Award nomination while giving the company its first Oscar win.   But before we get to those two movies, there's a whole bunch of others to talk about first.   Of the twelve movies Miramax would release in 1988, only four were from America. The rest would be a from a mixture of mostly Anglo-Saxon countries like the UK, Canada, France and Sweden, although there would be one Spanish film in there.   Their first release of the new year, Le Grand Chemin, told the story of a timid nine-year-old boy from Paris who spends one summer vacation in a small town in Brittany. His mother has lodged the boy with her friend and her friend's husband while Mom has another baby. The boy makes friends with a slightly older girl next door, and learns about life from her.   Richard Bohringer, who plays the friend's husband, and Anémone, who plays the pregnant mother, both won Cesars, the French equivalent to the Oscars, in their respective lead categories, and the film would be nominated for Best Foreign Language Film of 1987 by the National Board of Review. Miramax, who had picked up the film at Cannes several months earlier, waited until January 22nd, 1988, to release it in America, first at the Paris Theatre in midtown Manhattan, where it would gross a very impressive $41k in its first three days. In its second week, it would drop less than 25% of its opening weekend audience, bringing in another $31k. But shortly after that, the expected Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film did not come, and business on the film slowed to a trickle. But it kept chugging on, and by the time the film finished its run in early June, it had grossed $541k.   A week later, on January 29th, Miramax would open another French film, Light Years. An animated science fiction film written and directed by René Laloux, best known for directing the 1973 animated head trip film Fantastic Planet, Light Years was the story of an evil force from a thousand years in the future who begins to destroy an idyllic paradise where the citizens are in perfect harmony with nature.   In its first three days at two screens in Los Angeles and five screens in the San Francisco Bay Area, Light Years would gross a decent $48,665. Miramax would print a self-congratulating ad in that week's Variety touting the film's success, and thanking Isaac Asimov, who helped to write the English translation, and many of the actors who lent their vocal talents to the new dub, including Glenn Close, Bridget Fonda, Jennifer Grey, Christopher Plummer, and Penn and Teller. Yes, Teller speaks. The ad was a message to both the theatre operators and the major players in the industry. Miramax was here. Get used to it.   But that ad may have been a bit premature.   While the film would do well in major markets during its initial week in theatres, audience interest would drop outside of its opening week in big cities, and be practically non-existent in college towns and other smaller cities. Its final box office total would be just over $370k.   March 18th saw the release of a truly unique film.    Imagine a film directed by Robert Altman and Bruce Beresford and Jean-Luc Godard and Derek Jarman and Franc Roddam and Nicolas Roeg and Ken Russell and Charles Sturridge and Julien Temple. Imagine a film that starred Beverly D'Angelo, Bridget Fonda in her first movie, Julie Hagerty, Buck Henry, Elizabeth Hurley and John Hurt and Theresa Russell and Tilda Swinton. Imagine a film that brought together ten of the most eclectic filmmakers in the world doing four to fourteen minute short films featuring the arias of some of the most famous and beloved operas ever written, often taken out of their original context and placed into strange new places. Like, for example, the aria for Verdi's Rigoletto set at the kitschy Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo, where a movie producer is cheating on his wife while she is in a nearby room with a hunky man who is not her husband. Imagine that there's almost no dialogue in the film. Just the arias to set the moments.   That is Aria.   If you are unfamiliar with opera in general, and these arias specifically, that's not a problem. When I saw the film at the Nickelodeon Theatre in Santa Cruz in June 1988, I knew some Wagner, some Puccini, and some Verdi, through other movies that used the music as punctuation for a scene. I think the first time I had heard Nessun Dorma was in The Killing Fields. Vesti La Giubba in The Untouchables. But this would be the first time I would hear these arias as they were meant to be performed, even if they were out of context within their original stories. Certainly, Wagner didn't intend the aria from Tristan und Isolde to be used to highlight a suicide pact between a young couple killing themselves in a Las Vegas hotel bathroom.   Aria definitely split critics when it premiered at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival, when it competed for the festival's main prize, the Palme D'Or. Roger Ebert would call it the first MTV opera and felt the filmmakers were poking fun at their own styles, while Leonard Maltin felt most of the endeavor was a waste of time. In the review for the New York Times, Janet Maslin would also make a reference to MTV but not in a positive way, and would note the two best parts of the film were the photo montage that is seen over the end credits, and the clever licensing of Chuck Jones's classic Bugs Bunny cartoon What's Opera, Doc, to play with the film, at least during its New York run. In the Los Angeles Times, the newspaper chose one of its music critics to review the film. They too would compare the film to MTV, but also to Fantasia, neither reference meant to be positive.   It's easy to see what might have attracted Harvey Weinstein to acquire the film.   Nudity.   And lots of it.   Including from a 21 year old Hurley, and a 22 year old Fonda.   Open at the 420 seat Ridgemont Theatre in Seattle on March 18th, 1988, Aria would gross a respectable $10,600. It would be the second highest grossing theatre in the city, only behind The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which grossed $16,600 in its fifth week at the 850 seat Cinerama Theatre, which was and still is the single best theatre in Seattle. It would continue to do well in Seattle, but it would not open until April 15th in Los Angeles and May 20th in New York City.   But despite some decent notices and the presence of some big name directors, Aria would stiff at the box office, grossing just $1.03m after seven months in theatres.   As we discussed on our previous episode, there was a Dennis Hopper movie called Riders on the Storm that supposedly opened in November 1987, but didn't. It did open in theatres in May of 1988, and now we're here to talk about it.   Riders on the Storm would open in eleven theatres in the New York City area on May 7th, including three theatres in Manhattan. Since Miramax did not screen the film for critics before release, never a good sign, the first reviews wouldn't show up until the following day, since the critics would actually have to go see the film with a regular audience. Vincent Canby's review for the New York Times would arrive first, and surprisingly, he didn't completely hate the film. But audiences didn't care. In its first weekend in New York City, Riders on the Storm would gross an anemic $25k. The following Friday, Miramax would open the film at two theatres in Baltimore, four theatres in Fort Worth TX (but surprisingly none in Dallas), one theatre in Los Angeles and one theatre in Springfield OH, while continuing on only one screen in New York. No reported grosses from Fort Worth, LA or Springfield, but the New York theatre reported ticket sales of $3k for the weekend, a 57% drop from its previous week, while the two in Baltimore combined for $5k.   There would be more single playdates for a few months. Tampa the same week as New York. Atlanta, Charlotte, Des Moines and Memphis in late May. Cincinnati in late June. Boston, Calgary, Ottawa and Philadelphia in early July. Greenville SC in late August. Evansville IL, Ithaca NY and San Francisco in early September. Chicago in late September. It just kept popping up in random places for months, always a one week playdate before heading off to the next location. And in all that time, Miramax never reported grosses. What little numbers we do have is from the theatres that Variety was tracking, and those numbers totaled up to less than $30k.   Another mostly lost and forgotten Miramax release from 1988 is Caribe, a Canadian production that shot in Belize about an amateur illegal arms trader to Central American terrorists who must go on the run after a deal goes down bad, because who wants to see a Canadian movie about an amateur illegal arms trader to Canadian terrorists who must go on the run in the Canadian tundra after a deal goes down bad?   Kara Glover would play Helen, the arms dealer, and John Savage as Jeff, a British intelligence agent who helps Helen.   Caribe would first open in Detroit on May 20th, 1988. Can you guess what I'm going to say next?   Yep.   No reported grosses, no theatres playing the film tracked by Variety.   The following week, Caribe opens in the San Francisco Bay Area, at the 300 seat United Artists Theatre in San Francisco, and three theatres in the South Bay. While Miramax once again did not report grosses, the combined gross for the four theatres, according to Variety, was a weak $3,700. Compare that to Aria, which was playing at the Opera Plaza Cinemas in its third week in San Francisco, in an auditorium 40% smaller than the United Artist, grossing $5,300 on its own.   On June 3rd, Caribe would open at the AMC Fountain Square 14 in Nashville. One show only on Friday and Saturday at 11:45pm. Miramax did not report grosses. Probably because people we going to see Willie Tyler and Lester at Zanie's down the street.   And again, it kept cycling around the country, one or two new playdates in each city it played in. Philadelphia in mid-June. Indianapolis in mid-July. Jersey City in late August. Always for one week, grosses never reported.   Miramax's first Swedish release of the year was called Mio, but this was truly an international production. The $4m film was co-produced by Swedish, Norwegian and Russian production companies, directed by a Russian, adapted from a Swedish book by an American screenwriter, scored by one of the members of ABBA, and starring actors from England, Finland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the United States.   Mio tells the story of a boy from Stockholm who travels to an otherworldly fantasy realm and frees the land from an evil knight's oppression. What makes this movie memorable today is that Mio's best friend is played by none other than Christian Bale, in his very first film.   The movie was shot in Moscow, Stockholm, the Crimea, Scotland, and outside Pripyat in the Northern part of what is now Ukraine, between March and July 1986. In fact, the cast and crew were shooting outside Pripyat on April 26th, when they got the call they needed to evacuate the area. It would be hours later when they would discover there had been a reactor core meltdown at the nearby Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. They would have to scramble to shoot in other locations away from Ukraine for a month, and when they were finally allowed to return, the area they were shooting in deemed to have not been adversely affected by the worst nuclear power plant accident in human history,, Geiger counters would be placed all over the sets, and every meal served by craft services would need to be read to make sure it wasn't contaminated.   After premiering at the Moscow Film Festival in July 1987 and the Norwegian Film Festival in August, Mio would open in Sweden on October 16th, 1987. The local critics would tear the film apart. They hated that the filmmakers had Anglicized the movie with British actors like Christopher Lee, Susannah York, Christian Bale and Nicholas Pickard, an eleven year old boy also making his film debut. They also hated how the filmmakers adapted the novel by the legendary Astrid Lindgren, whose Pippi Longstocking novels made her and her works world famous. Overall, they hated pretty much everything about it outside of Christopher Lee's performance and the production's design in the fantasy world.   Miramax most likely picked it up trying to emulate the success of The Neverending Story, which had opened to great success in most of the world in 1984. So it might seem kinda odd that when they would open the now titled The Land of Faraway in theatres, they wouldn't go wide but instead open it on one screen in Atlanta GA on June 10th, 1988. And, once again, Miramax did not report grosses, and Variety did not track Atlanta theatres that week. Two weeks later, they would open the film in Miami. How many theatres? Can't tell you. Miramax did not report grosses, and Variety was not tracking any of the theatres in Miami playing the film. But hey, Bull Durham did pretty good in Miami that week.   The film would next open in theatres in Los Angeles. This time, Miramax bought a quarter page ad in the Los Angeles Times on opening day to let people know the film existed. So we know it was playing on 18 screens that weekend. And, once again, Miramax did not report grosses for the film. But on the two screens it played on that Variety was tracking, the combined gross was just $2,500.   There'd be other playdates. Kansas City and Minneapolis in mid-September. Vancouver, BC in early October. Palm Beach FL in mid October. Calgary AB and Fort Lauderdale in late October. Phoenix in mid November. And never once did Miramax report any grosses for it.   One week after Mio, Miramax would release a comedy called Going Undercover.   Now, if you listened to our March 2021 episode on Some Kind of Wonderful, you may remember be mentioning Lea Thompson taking the role of Amanda Jones in that film, a role she had turned down twice before, the week after Howard the Duck opened, because she was afraid she'd never get cast in a movie again. And while Some Kind of Wonderful wasn't as big a film as you'd expect from a John Hughes production, Thompson did indeed continue to work, and is still working to this day.   So if you were looking at a newspaper ad in several cities in June 1988 and saw her latest movie and wonder why she went back to making weird little movies.   She hadn't.   This was a movie she had made just before Back to the Future, in August and September 1984.   Originally titled Yellow Pages, the film starred film legend Jean Simmons as Maxine, a rich woman who has hired Chris Lemmon's private investigator Henry Brilliant to protect her stepdaughter Marigold during her trip to Copenhagen.   The director, James Clarke, had written the script specifically for Lemmon, tailoring his role to mimic various roles played by his famous father, Jack Lemmon, over the decades, and for Simmons. But Thompson was just one of a number of young actresses they looked at before making their casting choice.   Half of the $6m budget would come from a first-time British film producer, while the other half from a group of Danish investors wanting to lure more Hollywood productions to their area.   The shoot would be plagued by a number of problems. The shoot in Los Angeles coincided with the final days of the 1984 Summer Olympics, which would cut out using some of the best and most regularly used locations in the city, and a long-lasting heat wave that would make outdoor shoots unbearable for cast and crew. When they arrived in Copenhagen at the end of August, Denmark was going through an unusually heavy storm front that hung around for weeks.   Clarke would spend several months editing the film, longer than usual for a smaller production like this, but he in part was waiting to see how Back to the Future would do at the box office. If the film was a hit, and his leading actress was a major part of that, it could make it easier to sell his film to a distributor.   Or that was line of thinking.   Of course, Back to the Future was a hit, and Thompson received much praise for her comedic work on the film.   But that didn't make it any easier to sell his film.   The producer would set the first screenings for the film at the February 1986 American Film Market in Santa Monica, which caters not only to foreign distributors looking to acquire American movies for their markets, but helps independent filmmakers get their movies seen by American distributors.   As these screenings were for buyers by invitation only, there would be no reviews from the screenings, but one could guess that no one would hear about the film again until Miramax bought the American distribution rights to it in March 1988 tells us that maybe those screenings didn't go so well.   The film would get retitled Going Undercover, and would open in single screen playdates in Atlanta, Cincinnati, Dallas, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Nashville, Orlando, St. Louis and Tampa on June 17th. And as I've said too many times already, no reported grosses from Miramax, and only one theatre playing the film was being tracked by Variety, with Going Undercover earning $3,000 during its one week at the Century City 14 in Los Angeles.   In the June 22nd, 1988 issue of Variety, there was an article about Miramax securing a $25m line of credit in order to start producing their own films. Going Undercover is mentioned in the article about being one of Miramax's releases, without noting it had just been released that week or how well it did or did not do.   The Thin Blue Line would be Miramax's first non-music based documentary, and one that would truly change how documentaries were made.   Errol Morris had already made two bizarre but entertaining documentaries in the late 70s and early 80s. Gates of Heaven was shot in 1977, about a man who operated a failing pet cemetery in Northern California's Napa Valley. When Morris told his famous German filmmaking supporter Werner Herzog about the film, Herzog vowed to eat one of the shoes he was wearing that day if Morris could actually complete the film and have it shown in a public theatre. In April 1979, just before the documentary had its world premiere at UC Theatre in Berkeley, where Morris had studied philosophy, Herzog would spend the morning at Chez Pannise, the creators of the California Cuisine cooking style, boiling his shoes for five hours in garlic, herbs and stock. This event itself would be commemorated in a documentary short called, naturally, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, by Les Blank, which is a must watch on its own.   Because of the success of Gates of Heaven, Morris was able to quickly find financing for his next film, Nub City, which was originally supposed to be about the number of Vernon, Florida's citizens who have “accidentally” cut off their limbs, in order to collect the insurance money. But after several of those citizens threatened to kill Morris, and one of them tried to run down his cinematographer with their truck, Morris would rework the documentary, dropping the limb angle, no pun intended, and focus on the numerous eccentric people in the town. It would premiere at the 1981 New York Film Festival, and become a hit, for a documentary, when it was released in theatres in 1982.   But it would take Morris another six years after completing Vernon, Florida, to make another film. Part of it was having trouble lining up full funding to work on his next proposed movie, about James Grigson, a Texas forensic psychiatrist whose was nicknamed Doctor Death for being an expert witness for the prosecution in death penalty cases in Texas. Morris had gotten seed money for the documentary from PBS and the Endowment for Public Arts, but there was little else coming in while he worked on the film. In fact, Morris would get a PI license in New York and work cases for two years, using every penny he earned that wasn't going towards living expenses to keep the film afloat.   One of Morris's major problems for the film was that Grigson would not sit on camera for an interview, but would meet with Morris face to face to talk about the cases. During that meeting, the good doctor suggested to the filmmaker that he should research the killers he helped put away. And during that research, Morris would come across the case of one Randall Dale Adams, who was convicted of killing Dallas police officer Robert Wood in 1976, even though another man, David Harris, was the police's initial suspect. For two years, Morris would fly back and forth between New York City and Texas, talking to and filming interviews with Adams and more than two hundred other people connected to the shooting and the trial. Morris had become convinced Adams was indeed innocent, and dropped the idea about Dr. Grigson to solely focus on the Robert Wood murder.   After showing the producers of PBS's American Playhouse some of the footage he had put together of the new direction of the film, they kicked in more funds so that Morris could shoot some re-enactment sequences outside New York City, as well as commission composer Phillip Glass to create a score for the film once it was completed. Documentaries at that time did not regularly use re-enactments, but Morris felt it was important to show how different personal accounts of the same moment can be misinterpreted or misremembered or outright manipulated to suppress the truth.   After the film completed its post-production in March 1988, The Thin Blue Line would have its world premiere at the San Francisco Film Festival on March 18th, and word quickly spread Morris had something truly unique and special on his hands. The critic for Variety would note in the very first paragraph of his write up that the film employed “strikingly original formal devices to pull together diverse interviews, film clips, photo collages, and” and this is where it broke ground, “recreations of the crime from many points of view.”   Miramax would put together a full court press in order to get the rights to the film, which was announced during the opening days of the 1988 Cannes Film Festival in early May. An early hint on how the company was going to sell the film was by calling it a “non-fiction feature” instead of a documentary.   Miramax would send Morris out on a cross-country press tour in the weeks leading up to the film's August 26th opening date, but Morris, like many documentary filmmakers, was not used to being in the spotlight themselves, and was not as articulate about talking up his movies as the more seasoned directors and actors who've been on the promotion circuit for a while. After one interview, Harvey Weinstein would send Errol Morris a note.   “Heard your NPR interview and you were boring.”   Harvey would offer up several suggestions to help the filmmaker, including hyping the movie up as a real life mystery thriller rather than a documentary, and using shorter and clearer sentences when answering a question.   It was a clear gamble to release The Thin Blue Line in the final week of summer, and the film would need a lot of good will to stand out.   And it would get it.   The New York Times was so enthralled with the film, it would not only run a review from Janet Maslin, who would heap great praise on the film, but would also run a lengthy interview with Errol Morris right next to the review. The quarter page ad in the New York Times, several pages back, would tout positive quotes from Roger Ebert, J. Hoberman, who had left The Village Voice for the then-new Premiere Magazine, Peter Travers, writing for People Magazine instead of Rolling Stone, and critics from the San Francisco Chronicle and, interestingly enough, the Dallas Morning News. The top of the ad was tagged with an intriguing tease: solving this mystery is going to be murder, with a second tag line underneath the key art and title, which called the film “a new kind of movie mystery.” Of the 15 New York area-based film critics for local newspapers, television and national magazines, 14 of them gave favorable reviews, while 1, Stephen Schiff of Vanity Fair, was ambivalent about it. Not one critic gave it a bad review.   New York audiences were hooked.   Opening in the 240 seat main house at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, the movie grossed $30,945 its first three days. In its second weekend, the gross at the Lincoln Plaza would jump to $31k, and adding another $27,500 from its two theatre opening in Los Angeles and $15,800 from a single DC theatre that week. Third week in New York was a still good $21k, but the second week in Los Angeles fell to $10,500 and DC to $10k. And that's how it rolled out for several months, mostly single screen bookings in major cities not called Los Angeles or New York City, racking up some of the best reviews Miramax would receive to date, but never breaking out much outside the major cities. When it looked like Santa Cruz wasn't going to play the film, I drove to San Francisco to see it, just as my friends and I had for the opening day of Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ in mid-August. That's 75 miles each way, plus parking in San Francisco, just to see a movie. That's when you know you no longer just like movies but have developed a serious case of cinephilea. So when The Nickelodeon did open the film in late November, I did something I had never done with any documentary before.   I went and saw it again.   Second time around, I was still pissed off at the outrageous injustice heaped upon Randall Dale Adams for nothing more than being with and trusting the wrong person at the wrong time. But, thankfully, things would turn around for Adams in the coming weeks. On December 1st, it was reported that David Harris had recanted his testimony at Adams' trial, admitting he was alone when Officer Wood stopped his car. And on March 1st, 1989, after more than 15,000 people had signed the film's petition to revisit the decision, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned Adams's conviction “based largely” on facts presented in the film.   The film would also find itself in several more controversies.   Despite being named The Best Documentary of the Year by a number of critics groups, the Documentary Branch of the  Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences would not nominate the film, due in large part to the numerous reenactments presented throughout the film. Filmmaker Michael Apted, a member of the Directors Branch of the Academy, noted that the failure to acknowledge The Thin Blue Line was “one of the most outrageous things in the modern history of the Academy,” while Roger Ebert added the slight was “the worst non-nomination of the year.” Despite the lack of a nomination, Errol Morris would attend the Oscars ceremony in March 1989, as a protest for his film being snubbed.   Morris would also, several months after Adams' release, find himself being sued by Adams, but not because of how he was portrayed in the film. During the making of the film, Morris had Adams sign a contract giving Morris the exclusive right to tell Adams's story, and Adams wanted, essentially, the right to tell his own story now that he was a free man. Morris and Adams would settle out of court, and Adams would regain his life rights.   Once the movie was played out in theatres, it had grossed $1.2m, which on the surface sounds like not a whole lot of money. Adjusted for inflation, that would only be $3.08m. But even unadjusted for inflation, it's still one of the 100 highest grossing documentaries of the past forty years. And it is one of just a handful of documentaries to become a part of the National Film Registry, for being a culturally, historically or aesthetically significant film.”   Adams would live a quiet life after his release, working as an anti-death penalty advocate and marrying the sister of one of the death row inmates he was helping to exonerate. He would pass away from a brain tumor in October 2010 at a courthouse in Ohio not half an hour from where he was born and still lived, but he would so disappear from the spotlight after the movie was released that his passing wasn't even reported until June 2011.   Errol Morris would become one of the most celebrated documentarians of his generation, finally getting nominated for, and winning, an Oscar in 2003, for The Fog of War, about the life and times of Robert McNamara, Richard Nixon's Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War era. The Fog of War would also be added to the National Film Registry in 2019. Morris would become only the third documentarian, after D.A. Pennebaker and Les Blank, to have two films on the Registry.   In 1973, the senseless killings of five members of the Alday family in Donalsonville GA made international headlines. Four years later, Canadian documentarian Tex Fuller made an award-winning documentary about the case, called Murder One. For years, Fuller shopped around a screenplay telling the same story, but it would take nearly a decade for it to finally be sold, in part because Fuller was insistent that he also be the director. A small Canadian production company would fund the $1m CAD production, which would star Henry Thomas of E.T. fame as the fifteen year old narrator of the story, Billy Isaacs.   The shoot began in early October 1987 outside Toronto, but after a week of shooting, Fuller was fired, and was replaced by Graeme Campbell, a young and energetic filmmaker for whom Murder One would be his fourth movie directing gig of the year. Details are sketchy as to why Fuller was fired, but Thomas and his mother Carolyn would voice concerns with the producers about the new direction the film was taking under its new director.   The film would premiere in Canada in May 1988. When the film did well up North, Miramax took notice and purchased the American distribution rights.   Murder One would first open in America on two screens in Los Angeles on September 9th, 1988. Michael Wilmington of the Los Angeles Times noted that while the film itself wasn't very good, that it still sprung from the disturbing insight about the crazy reasons people cross of what should be impassable moral lines.   “No movie studio could have invented it!,” screamed the tagline on the poster and newspaper key art. “No writer could have imagined it! Because what happened that night became the most controversial in American history.”   That would draw limited interest from filmgoers in Tinseltown. The two theatres would gross a combined $7k in its first three days. Not great but far better than several other recent Miramax releases in the area.   Two weeks later, on September 23rd, Miramax would book Murder One into 20 theatres in the New York City metro region, as well as in Akron, Atlanta, Charlotte, Indianpolis, Nashville, and Tampa-St. Petersburg. In New York, the film would actually get some good reviews from the Times and the Post as well as Peter Travers of People Magazine, but once again, Miramax would not report grosses for the film. Variety would note the combined gross for the film in New York City was only $25k.   In early October, the film would fall out of Variety's internal list of the 50 Top Grossing Films within the twenty markets they regularly tracked, with a final gross of just $87k. One market that Miramax deliberately did not book the film was anywhere near southwest Georgia, where the murders took place. The closest theatre that did play the film was more than 200 miles away.   Miramax would finish 1988 with two releases.   The first was Dakota, which would mark star Lou Diamond Phillips first time as a producer. He would star as a troubled teenager who takes a job on a Texas horse ranch to help pay of his debts, who becomes a sorta big brother to the ranch owner's young son, who has recently lost a leg to cancer, as he also falls for the rancher's daughter.   When the $1.1m budgeted film began production in Texas in June 1987, Phillips had already made La Bamba and Stand and Deliver, but neither had yet to be released into theatres. By the time filming ended five weeks later, La Bamba had just opened, and Phillips was on his way to becoming a star.   The main producers wanted director Fred Holmes to get the film through post-production as quickly as possible, to get it into theatres in the early part of 1988 to capitalize on the newfound success of their young star.    But that wouldn't happen.   Holmes wouldn't have the film ready until the end of February 1988, which was deemed acceptable because of the impending release of Stand and Deliver. In fact, the producers would schedule their first distributor screening of the film on March 14th, the Monday after Stand and Delivered opened, in the hopes that good box office for the film and good notices for Phillips would translate to higher distributor interest in their film, which sorta worked. None of the major studios would show for the screening, but a number of Indies would, including Miramax. Phillips would not attend the screening, as he was on location in New Mexico shooting Young Guns.   I can't find any reason why Miramax waited nearly nine months after they acquired Dakota to get it into theatres. It certainly wasn't Oscar bait, and screen availability would be scarce during the busy holiday movie season, which would see a number of popular, high profile releases like Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Ernest Saves Christmas, The Naked Gun, Rain Man, Scrooged, Tequila Sunrise, Twins and Working Girl. Which might explain why, when Miramax released the film into 18 theatres in the New York City area on December 2nd, they could only get three screens in all of Manhattan, the best being the nice but hardly first-rate Embassy 4 at Broadway and 47th. Or of the 22 screens in Los Angeles opening the film the same day, the best would be the tiny Westwood 4 next to UCLA or the Paramount in Hollywood, whose best days were back in the Eisenhower administration.   And, yet again, Miramax did not report grosses, and none of the theatres playing the film was tracked by Variety that week. The film would be gone after just one week. The Paramount, which would open Dirty Rotten Scoundrels on the 14th, opted to instead play a double feature of Clara's Heart, with Whoopi Goldberg and Neil Patrick Harris, and the River Phoenix drama Running on Empty, even though neither film had been much of a hit.   Miramax's last film of the year would be the one that changed everything for them.   Pelle the Conquerer.   Adapted from a 1910 Danish book and directed by Billie August, whose previous film Twist and Shout had been released by Miramax in 1986, Pelle the Conquerer would be the first Danish or Swedish movie to star Max von Sydow in almost 15 years, having spent most of the 70s and 80s in Hollywood and London starring in a number of major movies including The Exorcist, Three Days of the Condor, Flash Gordon,Conan the Barbarian, Never Say Never Again, and David Lynch's Dune. But because von Sydow would be making his return to his native cinema, August was able to secure $4.5m to make the film, one of the highest budgeted Scandinavian films to be made to date.   In the late 1850s, an elderly emigrant Lasse and his son Pelle leave their home in Sweden after the death of the boy's mother, wanting to build a new life on the Danish island of Bornholm. Lasse finds it difficult to find work, given his age and his son's youth. The pair are forced to work at a large farm, where they are generally mistreated by the managers for being foreigners. The father falls into depression and alcoholism, the young boy befriends one of the bastard children of the farm owner as well as another Swedish farm worker, who dreams of conquering the world.   For the title character of Pelle, Billie August saw more than 3,000 Swedish boys before deciding to cast 11 year old Pelle Hvenegaard, who, like many boys in Sweden, had been named for the character he was now going to play on screen.   After six months of filming in the summer and fall of 1986, Billie August would finish editing Pelle the Conquerer in time for it to make its intended Christmas Day 1987 release date in Denmark and Sweden, where the film would be one of the biggest releases in either country for the entire decade. It would make its debut outside Scandinavia at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1988, where it had been invited to compete for the Palme D'Or. It would compete against a number of talented filmmakers who had come with some of the best films they would ever make, including Clint Eastwood with Bird, Claire Denis' Chocolat, István Szabó's Hanussen, Vincent Ward's The Navigator, and A Short Film About Killing, an expanded movie version of the fifth episode in Krzysztof Kieślowski's masterful miniseries Dekalog. Pelle would conquer them all, taking home the top prize from one of cinema's most revered film festivals.   Reviews for the film out of Cannes were almost universally excellent. Vincent Canby, the lead film critic for the New York Times for nearly twenty years by this point, wouldn't file his review until the end of the festival, in which he pointed out that a number of people at the festival were scandalized von Sydow had not also won the award for Best Actor.   Having previously worked with the company on his previous film's American release, August felt that Miramax would have what it took to make the film a success in the States.   Their first moves would be to schedule the film for a late December release, while securing a slot at that September's New York Film Festival. And once again, the critical consensus was highly positive, with only a small sampling of distractors.   The film would open first on two screens at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas in midtown Manhattan on Wednesday, December 21st, following by exclusive engagements in nine other cities including Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington DC, on the 23rd. But the opening week numbers weren't very good, just $46k from ten screens. And you can't really blame the film's two hour and forty-five minute running time. Little Dorrit, the two-part, four hour adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel, had been out nine weeks at this point and was still making nearly 50% more per screen.   But after the new year, when more and more awards were hurled the film's way, including the National Board of Review naming it one of the best foreign films of the year and the Golden Globes awarding it their Best Foreign Language trophy, ticket sales would pick up.   Well, for a foreign film.   The week after the Motion Picture Academy awarded Pelle their award for Best Foreign Language Film, business for the film would pick up 35%, and a third of its $2m American gross would come after that win.   One of the things that surprised me while doing the research for this episode was learning that Max von Sydow had never been nominated for an Oscar until he was nominated for Best Actor for Pelle the Conquerer. You look at his credits over the years, and it's just mind blowing. The Seventh Seal. Wild Strawberries. The Virgin Spring. The Greatest Story Ever Told. The Emigrants. The Exorcist. The Three Days of the Condor. Surely there was one performance amongst those that deserved recognition.   I hate to keep going back to A24, but there's something about a company's first Oscar win that sends that company into the next level. A24 didn't really become A24 until 2016, when three of their movies won Oscars, including Brie Larson for Best Actress in Room. And Miramax didn't really become the Miramax we knew and once loved until its win for Pelle.   Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again soon, when Episode 117, the fifth and final part of our miniseries on Miramax Films, is released.     Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about the movies we covered this episode.   The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.   Thank you again.   Good night.

Entramos em Agosto entre concertos de Blur em Portugal e com um novo disco da banda britânica, "The Ballad of Darren". Neste 19º episódio de Rádio Clube Altamont recordamos também os ícones Jane Birkin, e a sua marcante presença em "The Histoire de Melody Nelson" e Joe Strummer, figura central do documentário "The Future is Unwritten", de Julien Temple. Rádio Clube Altamont, uma parceria Futura - Rádio de Autor e Altamont.pt

On this episode, we're going to start a miniseries that I've been dreading doing, not because of the films this company produced and/or released during the 1980s, but because it means shining any kind of light on a serial sexual assaulter and his enabling brother. But one cannot do a show like this, talking about the movies of the 1980s, and completely ignore Miramax Films. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT   From Los Angeles, California. The Entertainment Capital of the World. It's the 80s Movie Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens/ Thank you for listening today.   On this episode, we're going to start a miniseries that I've been dreading doing, not because of the films this company produced and/or released during the 1980s, but because it means shining any kind of light on a serial sexual assaulter and his enabling brother. But one cannot do a show like this, talking about the movies of the 1980s, and completely ignore Miramax Films.   But I am not here to defend Harvey Weinstein. I am not here to make him look good. My focus for this series, however many they end up being, will focus on the films and the filmmakers. Because it's important to note that the Weinsteins did not have a hand in the production of any of the movies Miramax released in the 1980s, and the two that they did have a hand in making, one a horror film, the other a comedy that would be the only film the Weinsteins would ever direct themselves, were distributed by companies other than Miramax.   But before I do begin, I want to disclose my own personal history with the Weinsteins. As you may know, I was a movie theatre manager for Landmark Theatres in the mid 1990s, running their NuWilshire Theatre in Santa Monica. The theatre was acquired by Landmark from Mann Theatres in 1992, and quickly became a hot destination for arthouse films for those who didn't want to deal with the hassle of trying to get to the Laemmle Monica 4 about a mile away, situated in a very busy area right off the beach, full of tourists who don't know how to park properly and making a general nuisance of themselves to the locals. One of the first movies to play at the NuWilshire after Landmark acquired it was Quentin Tarantino's debut film, Reservoir Dogs, which was released by Miramax in the fall of 1992. The NuWilshire quickly became a sort of lucky charm to Harvey Weinstein, which I would learn when I left the Cineplex Beverly Center in June 1993 to take over the NuWilshire from my friend Will, the great-grandson of William Fox, the founder of Fox Films, who was being promoted to district manager and personally recommended me to replace him.   During my two plus years at the NuWilshire, I fielded a number of calls from Harvey Weinstein. Not his secretary. Not his marketing people.    Harvey himself.   Harvey took a great interest in the theatre, and regularly wanted feedback about how his films were performing at my theatre. I don't know if he had heard the stories about Stanley Kubrick doing the same thing years before, but I probably spoke to him at least once a month. I never met the man, and I didn't really enjoy speaking with him, because a phone call from him meant I wasn't doing the work I actually needed to do, but keeping Harvey would mean keeping to get his best films for my theatre, so I indulged him a bit more than I probably should have.   And that indulgence did occasionally have its perks. Although I was not the manager of the NuWilshire when Reservoir Dogs played there, Quentin Tarantino personally hand-delivered one of the first teaser posters for his second movie, Pulp Fiction, to me, asking me if I would put it up in our poster frame, even though we both knew we were never going to play the film with the cast he assembled and the reviews coming out of Cannes. He, like Harvey Weinstein, considered the theatre his lucky charm. I put the poster up, even though we never did play the film, and you probably know how well the film did. Maybe we were his lucky charm.   I also got to meet Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier weeks before their first film, Clerks, opened. We hosted a special screening sponsored by the Independent Feature Project, now known as Film Independent, whose work to help promote independent film goes far deeper than just handing out the Spirit Awards each year. Smith and Mosier were cool cats, and I was able to gift Smith something the following year when he screened Mallrats a few weeks before it opened.   And, thanks to Miramax, I was gifted something that ended up being one of the best nights of my life. An invitation to the Spirit Awards and after-party in 1995, the year Quentin Tarantino and Lawrence Bender won a number of awards for Pulp Fiction. At the after-party, my then-girlfriend and I ended up drinking tequila with Toni Collette, who was just making her mark on American movie screens that very weekend, thanks to Miramax's release of Muriel's Wedding, and then playing pool against Collette and Tarantino, while his Spirit Awards sat on a nearby table.   Twenty feet from stardom, indeed.   I left that job at the end of the summer in 1995, and I would not be involved with the Weinstein Brothers for a number of years, until after I had moved to New York City, started FilmJerk, and had become an established film critic. As a critic, I had been invited to an advance screening of Bad Santa at the AMC Empire 25, and on the way out, Bob Weinstein randomly stopped me in the lobby to ask me a few questions about my reaction to the film. Which was the one and only time I ever interacted with either brother face to face, and would be the last time I ever interacted with either of them in any capacity.   As a journalist, I felt it was necessary to disclose these things, although I don't believe these things have clouded my judgment about them. They were smart enough to acquire some good films early in their careers, built a successful distribution company with some very smart people who most likely knew about their boss's disgusting proclivities and neither said nor did anything about it, and would eventually succumb to the reckoning that was always going to come to them, one way or another. I'm saddened that so many women were hurt by these men, physically and emotionally, and I will not be satisfied that they got what was coming to them until they've answered for everything they did.   Okay, enough with the proselytizing.    I will only briefly go into the history of the Weinstein Brothers, and how they came to found Miramax, and I'm going to get that out of the way right now.   Harvey Weinstein and his younger brother Bob, were born in Queens, New York, and after Harvey went to college in Buffalo, the brothers would start up a rock concert promotion company in the area. After several successful years in the concert business, they would take their profits and start up an independent film distribution company which they named Miramax, after their parents, Miriam and Max. They would symbolically start the company up on December 31st, 1979.   Like the old joke goes, they may have been concert promoters, but they really wanted to be filmmakers. But they would need to build up the company first, and they would use their connections in the music industry to pick up the American distribution rights to Rockshow, the first concert movie featuring Paul McCartney and his post-Beatles band Wings, which had been filmed during their 1976 Wings Over the World tour. And even from the start, Harvey Weinstein would earn the derisive nickname many people would give him over the years, Harvey Scissorhands, as he would cut down what was originally a 125min movie down to 102mins.   Miramax would open Rockshow on nine screens in the New York City area on Wednesday, November 26th, 1980, including the prestigious Ziegfeld Theatre, for what was billed as a one-week only run. But the film would end up exceeding their wildest expectations, grossing $113k from those nine screens, including nearly $46k just from the Ziegfeld. The film would get its run extended a second week, the absolute final week, threatened the ads, but the film would continue to play, at least at the Ziegfeld, until Saturday December 13th, when the theatre was closed for five days to prepare for what the theatre expected to be their big hit of the Christmas season, Neil Diamond's first movie, The Jazz Singer. It would be a sad coincidence that Rockstar's run at the Ziegfeld had been extended, and was still playing the night McCartney's friend and former bandmate John Lennon was assassinated barely a mile away from the theatre.   But, strangely, instead of exploiting the death of Lennon and capitalize on the sudden, unexpected, tragic reemergence of Beatlemania, Miramax seems to have let the picture go. I cannot find any playdates for the film in any other city outside of The Big Apple after December 1980, and the film would be unseen in any form outside a brief home video release in 1982 until June 2013, when the restored 125min cut was released on DVD and Blu-Ray, after a one-night theatrical showing in cinemas worldwide.   As the Brothers Weinstein were in the process of gearing up Miramax, they would try their hand at writing and producing a movie themselves. Seeing that movies like Halloween and Friday the 13th were becoming hits, Harvey would write up a five-page treatment for a horror movie, based on an upstate New York boogeyman called Cropsey, which Harvey had first heard about during his school days at camp. Bob Weinstein would write the script for The Burning with steampunk author Peter Lawrence in six weeks, hire a British music documentary filmmaker, Tony Maylam, the brothers knew through their concert promoting days, and they would have the film in production in Buffalo, New York, in the summer of 1980, with makeup effects by Tom Savini.   Once the film was complete, they accepted a purchase deal from Filmways Pictures, covering most of the cost of the $1.5m production, which they would funnel right back into their fledgling distribution company. But when The Burning opened in and around the Florida area on May 15th, 1981, the market was already overloaded with horror films, from Oliver Stone's The Hand and Edward Bianchi's The Fan, to Lewis Teague's Alligator and J. Lee Thompson's Happy Birthday to Me, to Joe Dante's The Howling and the second installment of the Friday the 13th series. Outside of Buffalo, where the movie was shot, the film did not perform well, no matter how many times Filmways tried to sell it. After several months, The Burning would only gross about $300k, which would help drive Filmways into bankruptcy. As we talked about a couple years ago on our series about Orion Pictures, Orion would buy all the assets from Filmways, including The Burning, which they would re-release into theatres with new artwork, into the New York City metropolitan region on November 5th, 1982, to help promote the upcoming home video release of the film. In just seven days in 78 theatres, the film would gross $401k, more than it had earned over its entire run during the previous year. But the film would be gone from theatres the following week, as many exhibitors do not like playing movies that were also playing on cable and/or available on videotape. It is estimated the film's final gross was about $750k in the US, but the film would become a minor success on home video and repeated cable screenings.   Now, some sources on the inter webs will tell you the first movie Miramax released was Goodbye, Emmanuelle, based in part on a profile of the brothers and their company in a March 2000 issue of Fortune Magazine, in which writer Tim Carvell makes this claim. Whether this info nugget came from bad research, or a bad memory on the part of one or both of the brothers, it simply is not true. Goodbye, Emmanuelle, as released by Miramax in an edited and dubbed version, would be released more than a year after Rockshow, on December 5th, 1981. It would gross a cool $241k in 50 theatres in New York City, but lose 80% of its screens in its second week, mostly for Miramax's next film, a low budget, British-made sci-fi sex comedy called Spaced Out.   Or, at least, that's what the brothers thought would be a better title for a movie called Outer Touch in the UK.   Which I can't necessarily argue. Outer Touch is a pretty dumb title for a movie. Even the film's director, Normal Warren, agreed. But that's all he would agree with the brothers on. He hated everything else they did to his film to prepare it for American release. Harvey would edit the film down to just 77mins in length, had a new dub created to de-emphasize the British accents of the original actors, and changed the music score and the ending. And for his efforts, Weinstein would see some success when the film was released into 41 theatres in New York on December 11th, 1981. But whether or not it was because of the film itself, which was very poorly reviewed, or because it was paired with the first re-issue of The Groove Tube since Chevy Chase, one of the actors in that film, became a star, remains to be seen.   Miramax would only release one movie for all of 1982, but it would end up being their first relative hit film.   Between 1976 and 1981, there were four live shows of music and comedy in the United Kingdom for the benefit of Amnesty International. Inspired by former Monty Python star John Cleese, these shows would raise millions for the international non-governmental organization focused on human rights issues around the world. The third show, in 1979, was called The Secret Policeman's Ball, and would not only feature Cleese, who also directed the live show, performing with his fellow Pythons Terry Jones and Michael Palin, but would also be a major launching pad for two of the most iconic comedians of the 1980s, English comedian Rowan Atkinson and Scottish comedian Billy Connelly. But unlike the first two Amnesty benefit shows, Cleese decided to add some musical acts to the bill, including Pete Townshend of The Who.   The shows would be a big success in the United Kingdom, and the Weinsteins, once again using their connections in the music scene, would buy the American film rights to the show before they actually incorporated Miramax Films. That purchase would be the impetus for creating the company.   One slight problem, though.   The show was, naturally, very British. One bit from the show, featuring the legendary British comedian and actor Peter Cook, was a nine-minute bit summing up a recent bit of British history, the leader of the British Labour Party being tried on charges of conspiracy and incitement to murder his ex-boyfriend, would not make any sense to anyone who wasn't following the trial. All in all, even with the musical segments featuring Townshend, the Weinsteins felt there was only about forty minutes worth of material that could be used for a movie.   It also didn't help that the show was shot with 16mm film, which would be extremely grainy when blown up to 35mm.   But while they hemmed and hawed through trying to shape the film. Cleese and his show partners at Amnesty decided to do another set of benefit shows in 1981, this time called The Secret Policeman's Other Ball. Knowing that there might be interest in a film version of this show, the team would decide to shoot this show in 35mm. Cleese would co-direct the live show, while music video director Julien Temple would be in charge of filming. And judging from the success of an EP released in 1980 featuring Townshend's performance at the previous show, Cleese would arrange for more musical artists to perform, including Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Phil Collins, Donovan, Bob Geldof, Sting, and Midge Ure of Ultraviolet. In fact, it would be because of their participation in these shows that would lead Geldof and Ure to form Band Aid in 1984, which would raise $24m for famine relief in Ethiopia in just three months, and the subsequent Live Aid shows in July 1985 would raise another $126m worldwide.   The 1981 Amnesty benefit shows were a success, especially the one-time-only performance of a supergroup called The Secret Police, comprising of Beck, Clapton, Geldof and Sting performing Bob Dylan's I Shall Be Released at the show's closing, and the Weinsteins would make another deal to buy the American movie rights to these shows. While Temple's version of the 1981 shows would show as intended for UK audiences in 1982, the co-creator of the series, British producer Martin Lewis, would spend three months in New York City with Harvey Weinstein at the end of 1981 and start of 1982, working to turn the 1979 and 1981 shows into one cohesive movie geared towards American audiences. After premiering at the Los Angeles International Film Exposition in March 1982, The Secret Policeman's Other Ball would open on nine screens in the greater New York City metropolitan area on May 21st, but only on one screen in all of Manhattan. And in its first three days, the movie would gross an amazing $116k, including $36,750 at the Sutton theatre in the Midtown East part of New York City. Even more astounding is that, in its second weekend at the same nine theaters, the film would actually increase its gross to $121k, when most movies in their second week were seeing their grosses drop 30-50% because of the opening of Rocky III. And after just four weeks in just New York City, on just nine or ten screens each week, The Secret Policeman's Other Ball would gross more than $400k. The film would already be profitable for Miramax.   But the Weinsteins were still cautious. It wouldn't be until July 16th when they'd start to send the film out to other markets like Los Angeles, where they could only get five theatres to show the film, including the brand new Cineplex Beverly Center, itself opening the same day, which, as the first Cineplex in America, was as desperate to show any movie it could as Miramax was to show the movie at any theatre it could.   When all was said and done, The Secret Policeman's Other Ball would gross nearly $4m in American theatres.   So, you'd think now they had a hit film under their belts, Miramax would gear up and start acquiring more films and establishing themselves as a true up and coming independent distributor.   Right?   You'd think.   Now, I already said The Secret Policeman's Other Ball was their only release in 1982.   So, naturally, you'd think their first of like ten or twelve releases for 1983 would come in January.   Right?   You'd think.   In fact, Miramax's next theatrical release, the first theatrical release of D.A. Pennebaker's Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars concert film from the legendary final Ziggy show at the Hammersmith Odeon in London on July 3, 1973, would not come until December 23rd, 1983. And, for the third time in three years, it would be their music connections that would help the Weinsteins acquire a film.   Although the Ziggy Stardust movie had been kicking around for years, mostly one-night-only 16mm screenings on college campuses and a heavily edited 44min version that aired once on American television network ABC in October 1974, this would be the first time a full-length 90min version of the movie would be seen. And the timing for it couldn't have come at a better time. 1983 had been a banner year for the musician and occasional actor. His album Let's Dance had sold more than five million copies worldwide and spawned three hit singles. His Serious Moonlight tour, his first concert tour in five years, was the biggest tour of the year. And he won critical praise for his role as  a British prisoner of war in Nagisa Ōshima's powerful Japanese World War II film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.   The Weinsteins would enlist the help of 20th Century Fox to get the film into theatres during a very competitive Christmas moviegoing season. But despite their best efforts, Fox and Miramax could only nab one theatre in all of New York City, the 8th Street Playhouse in lower Manhattan, and five in Los Angeles, including two screens at the Cineplex Beverly Center. And for the weekend, its $58,500 gross would be quite decent, with a per screen average above such films as Scarface, Sudden Impact and Yentl. But in its second weekend, the all-important Christmas week, the gross would fall nearly 50% when the vast majority of movies improve their grosses with kids out of school and wage earners getting time off for the holidays. Fox and Miramax would stay committed to the film through the early part of 1984, but they'd keep costs down by rotating the six prints made for New York and Los Angeles to other cities as those playdates wound down, and only buying eighth-page display ads in local newspapers' entertainment section when it arrived in a new city. The final gross would fall short of half a million dollars, but the film would find its audience on home video later in the year. And while the Weinsteins are no longer involved with the handling of the film, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars will be getting a theatrical release across the planet the first week of July 2023, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the concert.   So, here were are, four years into the formation of Miramax Films, and they only released five films into theatres, plus wrote and produced another released by Filmways. One minor hit, four disappointments, and we're still four years away from them becoming the distributor they'd become. But we're going to stop here today because I like to keep these episodes short.   Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again next week, when we continue with story of Miramax Films, from 1984 to 1987.   Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about the movies we covered this episode.   The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.   Thank you again.   Good night.

On this episode, we're going to start a miniseries that I've been dreading doing, not because of the films this company produced and/or released during the 1980s, but because it means shining any kind of light on a serial sexual assaulter and his enabling brother. But one cannot do a show like this, talking about the movies of the 1980s, and completely ignore Miramax Films. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT   From Los Angeles, California. The Entertainment Capital of the World. It's the 80s Movie Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens/ Thank you for listening today.   On this episode, we're going to start a miniseries that I've been dreading doing, not because of the films this company produced and/or released during the 1980s, but because it means shining any kind of light on a serial sexual assaulter and his enabling brother. But one cannot do a show like this, talking about the movies of the 1980s, and completely ignore Miramax Films.   But I am not here to defend Harvey Weinstein. I am not here to make him look good. My focus for this series, however many they end up being, will focus on the films and the filmmakers. Because it's important to note that the Weinsteins did not have a hand in the production of any of the movies Miramax released in the 1980s, and the two that they did have a hand in making, one a horror film, the other a comedy that would be the only film the Weinsteins would ever direct themselves, were distributed by companies other than Miramax.   But before I do begin, I want to disclose my own personal history with the Weinsteins. As you may know, I was a movie theatre manager for Landmark Theatres in the mid 1990s, running their NuWilshire Theatre in Santa Monica. The theatre was acquired by Landmark from Mann Theatres in 1992, and quickly became a hot destination for arthouse films for those who didn't want to deal with the hassle of trying to get to the Laemmle Monica 4 about a mile away, situated in a very busy area right off the beach, full of tourists who don't know how to park properly and making a general nuisance of themselves to the locals. One of the first movies to play at the NuWilshire after Landmark acquired it was Quentin Tarantino's debut film, Reservoir Dogs, which was released by Miramax in the fall of 1992. The NuWilshire quickly became a sort of lucky charm to Harvey Weinstein, which I would learn when I left the Cineplex Beverly Center in June 1993 to take over the NuWilshire from my friend Will, the great-grandson of William Fox, the founder of Fox Films, who was being promoted to district manager and personally recommended me to replace him.   During my two plus years at the NuWilshire, I fielded a number of calls from Harvey Weinstein. Not his secretary. Not his marketing people.    Harvey himself.   Harvey took a great interest in the theatre, and regularly wanted feedback about how his films were performing at my theatre. I don't know if he had heard the stories about Stanley Kubrick doing the same thing years before, but I probably spoke to him at least once a month. I never met the man, and I didn't really enjoy speaking with him, because a phone call from him meant I wasn't doing the work I actually needed to do, but keeping Harvey would mean keeping to get his best films for my theatre, so I indulged him a bit more than I probably should have.   And that indulgence did occasionally have its perks. Although I was not the manager of the NuWilshire when Reservoir Dogs played there, Quentin Tarantino personally hand-delivered one of the first teaser posters for his second movie, Pulp Fiction, to me, asking me if I would put it up in our poster frame, even though we both knew we were never going to play the film with the cast he assembled and the reviews coming out of Cannes. He, like Harvey Weinstein, considered the theatre his lucky charm. I put the poster up, even though we never did play the film, and you probably know how well the film did. Maybe we were his lucky charm.   I also got to meet Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier weeks before their first film, Clerks, opened. We hosted a special screening sponsored by the Independent Feature Project, now known as Film Independent, whose work to help promote independent film goes far deeper than just handing out the Spirit Awards each year. Smith and Mosier were cool cats, and I was able to gift Smith something the following year when he screened Mallrats a few weeks before it opened.   And, thanks to Miramax, I was gifted something that ended up being one of the best nights of my life. An invitation to the Spirit Awards and after-party in 1995, the year Quentin Tarantino and Lawrence Bender won a number of awards for Pulp Fiction. At the after-party, my then-girlfriend and I ended up drinking tequila with Toni Collette, who was just making her mark on American movie screens that very weekend, thanks to Miramax's release of Muriel's Wedding, and then playing pool against Collette and Tarantino, while his Spirit Awards sat on a nearby table.   Twenty feet from stardom, indeed.   I left that job at the end of the summer in 1995, and I would not be involved with the Weinstein Brothers for a number of years, until after I had moved to New York City, started FilmJerk, and had become an established film critic. As a critic, I had been invited to an advance screening of Bad Santa at the AMC Empire 25, and on the way out, Bob Weinstein randomly stopped me in the lobby to ask me a few questions about my reaction to the film. Which was the one and only time I ever interacted with either brother face to face, and would be the last time I ever interacted with either of them in any capacity.   As a journalist, I felt it was necessary to disclose these things, although I don't believe these things have clouded my judgment about them. They were smart enough to acquire some good films early in their careers, built a successful distribution company with some very smart people who most likely knew about their boss's disgusting proclivities and neither said nor did anything about it, and would eventually succumb to the reckoning that was always going to come to them, one way or another. I'm saddened that so many women were hurt by these men, physically and emotionally, and I will not be satisfied that they got what was coming to them until they've answered for everything they did.   Okay, enough with the proselytizing.    I will only briefly go into the history of the Weinstein Brothers, and how they came to found Miramax, and I'm going to get that out of the way right now.   Harvey Weinstein and his younger brother Bob, were born in Queens, New York, and after Harvey went to college in Buffalo, the brothers would start up a rock concert promotion company in the area. After several successful years in the concert business, they would take their profits and start up an independent film distribution company which they named Miramax, after their parents, Miriam and Max. They would symbolically start the company up on December 31st, 1979.   Like the old joke goes, they may have been concert promoters, but they really wanted to be filmmakers. But they would need to build up the company first, and they would use their connections in the music industry to pick up the American distribution rights to Rockshow, the first concert movie featuring Paul McCartney and his post-Beatles band Wings, which had been filmed during their 1976 Wings Over the World tour. And even from the start, Harvey Weinstein would earn the derisive nickname many people would give him over the years, Harvey Scissorhands, as he would cut down what was originally a 125min movie down to 102mins.   Miramax would open Rockshow on nine screens in the New York City area on Wednesday, November 26th, 1980, including the prestigious Ziegfeld Theatre, for what was billed as a one-week only run. But the film would end up exceeding their wildest expectations, grossing $113k from those nine screens, including nearly $46k just from the Ziegfeld. The film would get its run extended a second week, the absolute final week, threatened the ads, but the film would continue to play, at least at the Ziegfeld, until Saturday December 13th, when the theatre was closed for five days to prepare for what the theatre expected to be their big hit of the Christmas season, Neil Diamond's first movie, The Jazz Singer. It would be a sad coincidence that Rockstar's run at the Ziegfeld had been extended, and was still playing the night McCartney's friend and former bandmate John Lennon was assassinated barely a mile away from the theatre.   But, strangely, instead of exploiting the death of Lennon and capitalize on the sudden, unexpected, tragic reemergence of Beatlemania, Miramax seems to have let the picture go. I cannot find any playdates for the film in any other city outside of The Big Apple after December 1980, and the film would be unseen in any form outside a brief home video release in 1982 until June 2013, when the restored 125min cut was released on DVD and Blu-Ray, after a one-night theatrical showing in cinemas worldwide.   As the Brothers Weinstein were in the process of gearing up Miramax, they would try their hand at writing and producing a movie themselves. Seeing that movies like Halloween and Friday the 13th were becoming hits, Harvey would write up a five-page treatment for a horror movie, based on an upstate New York boogeyman called Cropsey, which Harvey had first heard about during his school days at camp. Bob Weinstein would write the script for The Burning with steampunk author Peter Lawrence in six weeks, hire a British music documentary filmmaker, Tony Maylam, the brothers knew through their concert promoting days, and they would have the film in production in Buffalo, New York, in the summer of 1980, with makeup effects by Tom Savini.   Once the film was complete, they accepted a purchase deal from Filmways Pictures, covering most of the cost of the $1.5m production, which they would funnel right back into their fledgling distribution company. But when The Burning opened in and around the Florida area on May 15th, 1981, the market was already overloaded with horror films, from Oliver Stone's The Hand and Edward Bianchi's The Fan, to Lewis Teague's Alligator and J. Lee Thompson's Happy Birthday to Me, to Joe Dante's The Howling and the second installment of the Friday the 13th series. Outside of Buffalo, where the movie was shot, the film did not perform well, no matter how many times Filmways tried to sell it. After several months, The Burning would only gross about $300k, which would help drive Filmways into bankruptcy. As we talked about a couple years ago on our series about Orion Pictures, Orion would buy all the assets from Filmways, including The Burning, which they would re-release into theatres with new artwork, into the New York City metropolitan region on November 5th, 1982, to help promote the upcoming home video release of the film. In just seven days in 78 theatres, the film would gross $401k, more than it had earned over its entire run during the previous year. But the film would be gone from theatres the following week, as many exhibitors do not like playing movies that were also playing on cable and/or available on videotape. It is estimated the film's final gross was about $750k in the US, but the film would become a minor success on home video and repeated cable screenings.   Now, some sources on the inter webs will tell you the first movie Miramax released was Goodbye, Emmanuelle, based in part on a profile of the brothers and their company in a March 2000 issue of Fortune Magazine, in which writer Tim Carvell makes this claim. Whether this info nugget came from bad research, or a bad memory on the part of one or both of the brothers, it simply is not true. Goodbye, Emmanuelle, as released by Miramax in an edited and dubbed version, would be released more than a year after Rockshow, on December 5th, 1981. It would gross a cool $241k in 50 theatres in New York City, but lose 80% of its screens in its second week, mostly for Miramax's next film, a low budget, British-made sci-fi sex comedy called Spaced Out.   Or, at least, that's what the brothers thought would be a better title for a movie called Outer Touch in the UK.   Which I can't necessarily argue. Outer Touch is a pretty dumb title for a movie. Even the film's director, Normal Warren, agreed. But that's all he would agree with the brothers on. He hated everything else they did to his film to prepare it for American release. Harvey would edit the film down to just 77mins in length, had a new dub created to de-emphasize the British accents of the original actors, and changed the music score and the ending. And for his efforts, Weinstein would see some success when the film was released into 41 theatres in New York on December 11th, 1981. But whether or not it was because of the film itself, which was very poorly reviewed, or because it was paired with the first re-issue of The Groove Tube since Chevy Chase, one of the actors in that film, became a star, remains to be seen.   Miramax would only release one movie for all of 1982, but it would end up being their first relative hit film.   Between 1976 and 1981, there were four live shows of music and comedy in the United Kingdom for the benefit of Amnesty International. Inspired by former Monty Python star John Cleese, these shows would raise millions for the international non-governmental organization focused on human rights issues around the world. The third show, in 1979, was called The Secret Policeman's Ball, and would not only feature Cleese, who also directed the live show, performing with his fellow Pythons Terry Jones and Michael Palin, but would also be a major launching pad for two of the most iconic comedians of the 1980s, English comedian Rowan Atkinson and Scottish comedian Billy Connelly. But unlike the first two Amnesty benefit shows, Cleese decided to add some musical acts to the bill, including Pete Townshend of The Who.   The shows would be a big success in the United Kingdom, and the Weinsteins, once again using their connections in the music scene, would buy the American film rights to the show before they actually incorporated Miramax Films. That purchase would be the impetus for creating the company.   One slight problem, though.   The show was, naturally, very British. One bit from the show, featuring the legendary British comedian and actor Peter Cook, was a nine-minute bit summing up a recent bit of British history, the leader of the British Labour Party being tried on charges of conspiracy and incitement to murder his ex-boyfriend, would not make any sense to anyone who wasn't following the trial. All in all, even with the musical segments featuring Townshend, the Weinsteins felt there was only about forty minutes worth of material that could be used for a movie.   It also didn't help that the show was shot with 16mm film, which would be extremely grainy when blown up to 35mm.   But while they hemmed and hawed through trying to shape the film. Cleese and his show partners at Amnesty decided to do another set of benefit shows in 1981, this time called The Secret Policeman's Other Ball. Knowing that there might be interest in a film version of this show, the team would decide to shoot this show in 35mm. Cleese would co-direct the live show, while music video director Julien Temple would be in charge of filming. And judging from the success of an EP released in 1980 featuring Townshend's performance at the previous show, Cleese would arrange for more musical artists to perform, including Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Phil Collins, Donovan, Bob Geldof, Sting, and Midge Ure of Ultraviolet. In fact, it would be because of their participation in these shows that would lead Geldof and Ure to form Band Aid in 1984, which would raise $24m for famine relief in Ethiopia in just three months, and the subsequent Live Aid shows in July 1985 would raise another $126m worldwide.   The 1981 Amnesty benefit shows were a success, especially the one-time-only performance of a supergroup called The Secret Police, comprising of Beck, Clapton, Geldof and Sting performing Bob Dylan's I Shall Be Released at the show's closing, and the Weinsteins would make another deal to buy the American movie rights to these shows. While Temple's version of the 1981 shows would show as intended for UK audiences in 1982, the co-creator of the series, British producer Martin Lewis, would spend three months in New York City with Harvey Weinstein at the end of 1981 and start of 1982, working to turn the 1979 and 1981 shows into one cohesive movie geared towards American audiences. After premiering at the Los Angeles International Film Exposition in March 1982, The Secret Policeman's Other Ball would open on nine screens in the greater New York City metropolitan area on May 21st, but only on one screen in all of Manhattan. And in its first three days, the movie would gross an amazing $116k, including $36,750 at the Sutton theatre in the Midtown East part of New York City. Even more astounding is that, in its second weekend at the same nine theaters, the film would actually increase its gross to $121k, when most movies in their second week were seeing their grosses drop 30-50% because of the opening of Rocky III. And after just four weeks in just New York City, on just nine or ten screens each week, The Secret Policeman's Other Ball would gross more than $400k. The film would already be profitable for Miramax.   But the Weinsteins were still cautious. It wouldn't be until July 16th when they'd start to send the film out to other markets like Los Angeles, where they could only get five theatres to show the film, including the brand new Cineplex Beverly Center, itself opening the same day, which, as the first Cineplex in America, was as desperate to show any movie it could as Miramax was to show the movie at any theatre it could.   When all was said and done, The Secret Policeman's Other Ball would gross nearly $4m in American theatres.   So, you'd think now they had a hit film under their belts, Miramax would gear up and start acquiring more films and establishing themselves as a true up and coming independent distributor.   Right?   You'd think.   Now, I already said The Secret Policeman's Other Ball was their only release in 1982.   So, naturally, you'd think their first of like ten or twelve releases for 1983 would come in January.   Right?   You'd think.   In fact, Miramax's next theatrical release, the first theatrical release of D.A. Pennebaker's Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars concert film from the legendary final Ziggy show at the Hammersmith Odeon in London on July 3, 1973, would not come until December 23rd, 1983. And, for the third time in three years, it would be their music connections that would help the Weinsteins acquire a film.   Although the Ziggy Stardust movie had been kicking around for years, mostly one-night-only 16mm screenings on college campuses and a heavily edited 44min version that aired once on American television network ABC in October 1974, this would be the first time a full-length 90min version of the movie would be seen. And the timing for it couldn't have come at a better time. 1983 had been a banner year for the musician and occasional actor. His album Let's Dance had sold more than five million copies worldwide and spawned three hit singles. His Serious Moonlight tour, his first concert tour in five years, was the biggest tour of the year. And he won critical praise for his role as  a British prisoner of war in Nagisa Ōshima's powerful Japanese World War II film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.   The Weinsteins would enlist the help of 20th Century Fox to get the film into theatres during a very competitive Christmas moviegoing season. But despite their best efforts, Fox and Miramax could only nab one theatre in all of New York City, the 8th Street Playhouse in lower Manhattan, and five in Los Angeles, including two screens at the Cineplex Beverly Center. And for the weekend, its $58,500 gross would be quite decent, with a per screen average above such films as Scarface, Sudden Impact and Yentl. But in its second weekend, the all-important Christmas week, the gross would fall nearly 50% when the vast majority of movies improve their grosses with kids out of school and wage earners getting time off for the holidays. Fox and Miramax would stay committed to the film through the early part of 1984, but they'd keep costs down by rotating the six prints made for New York and Los Angeles to other cities as those playdates wound down, and only buying eighth-page display ads in local newspapers' entertainment section when it arrived in a new city. The final gross would fall short of half a million dollars, but the film would find its audience on home video later in the year. And while the Weinsteins are no longer involved with the handling of the film, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars will be getting a theatrical release across the planet the first week of July 2023, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the concert.   So, here were are, four years into the formation of Miramax Films, and they only released five films into theatres, plus wrote and produced another released by Filmways. One minor hit, four disappointments, and we're still four years away from them becoming the distributor they'd become. But we're going to stop here today because I like to keep these episodes short.   Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again next week, when we continue with story of Miramax Films, from 1984 to 1987.   Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about the movies we covered this episode.   The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.   Thank you again.   Good night.

This week, we finish our three part episode on the 1980s distribution company Vestron Pictures. ----more---- The movies discussed on this week's episode are: The Adventures of a Gnome Named Gnorm (1990, Stan Winston) Big Man on Campus (1989, Jeremy Paul Kagan) Dream a Little Dream (1989, Marc Rocco) Earth Girls Are Easy (1989, Julien Temple) Far From Home (1989, Meiert Avis) Paperhouse (1989, Bernard Rose) Parents (1989, Bob Balaban) The Rainbow (1989, Ken Russell) Wonderland (1989, Philip Saville)   TRANSCRIPT From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it's The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.   At the end of the previous episode, Vestron Pictures was starting to experience the turbulence a number of independent distributors faced when they had a successful film too soon out of the gate, and the direction of the company seemingly changes to go chasing more waterfalls instead of sticking to the rivers and the lakes they were used to.   Welcome to Part Three of our miniseries.   As we enter 1989, Vestron is seriously in trouble. More money has gone out then has come back in. It seems that they needed one more hit to keep going for a while longer. But if you were to look at their release schedule for the year, which included a pickup from the recently bankrupt DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group, there wasn't really anything that felt like it could be a Dirty Dancing-like break out, except for maybe the pickup from the recently bankrupt DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group.    But we'll get there in a moment.   Their first film from 1989 is a certifiable cult film if there ever was one, but the problem with this label is that the film tagged as so was not a success upon its initial theatrical release. Bob Balaban, the beloved character actor who had been regularly seen on screen since his memorable debut in Midnight Cowboy twenty years earlier, would make his directorial debut with the black comedy horror film Parents.   Bryan Madorsky stars as Michael Laemle, a ten year old boy living in the California suburbs in the 1950s, who starts to suspect mom and dad, played by Mary Beth Hurt and Randy Quaid, might be cannibals. It's a strange but fun little movie, and even Ken Russell would compare it favorably over David Lynch's Blue Velvet during one contemporary interview, but sadly, it would take far more time for the film to find its audience than Vestron could afford.   Opening in 94 theatres on January 27th, the $3m Parents could not overcome a series of negative reviews from critics, and it would only gross $278k in its first three days. Vestron would not strike any additional prints of the film, and would cycle the ones they did have around the country for several months, but after four months, the film could only attract $870k in box office receipts. But it would become something of a cult hit on video later in the year.   In 1992, British filmmaker Bernard Rose would make his American directing debut with an all-time banger, Candyman. But he wouldn't gotten Candyman if it wasn't for his 1989 film Paperhouse, an inventive story about a young girl whose drawings seem to manifest into reality. British actor Ben Cross from Chariots of Fire and American actress Glenne Headly from Dirty Rotten Scoundrels plays the young girl's parents.   Outside of Gene Siskel, who would give the film a thumbs down on his movie review show with Roger Ebert despite acknowledging Rose's talent as a filmmaker and being fascinated by the first two-thirds of the movie, the critical consensus was extraordinary. But it appears Siskel may have never actually written a review of the film for the Chicago Tribune, as the film still has a 100% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. But the film would only earn $6,700 from its single screen playdate at the Carnegie Hall Cinemas when it opened on February 17th, and the film would get little support from Vestron after that. More single playdates in major cities that added up to a $241k box office tally after fourteen weeks in release.   Marc Rocco's Dream a Little Dream would be the third film in The Two Coreys Cinematic Universe. Corey Feldman plays a high school student who, through one of the strangest plot twists in the whole body switching genre, finds himself switching places with two time Academy Award-winner Jason Robards, playing a professor who is looking for immortality through entering a meditative alpha state. Meredith Salinger and Piper Laurie also find themselves switching bodies as well, while Corey Haim plays the goofball best friend with not a whole lot to do. The supporting cast also includes veteran character actors Harry Dean Stanton and Alex Rocco, the latter who agreed to do the film because it was directed by his son.   When the film opened on March 3rd, it would be Vestron's second widest release, opening on more than 1,000 theatres. But just like the previous year's License to Drive, the pairing of Corey Haim and Corey Feldman did not set the box office on fire, opening in fifth place with $2.57m in ticket sales, compared to the #1 film of the week, the Morgan Freeman drama Lean on Me, which would gross twice as much as Dream a Little Dream while playing in 125 fewer theatres. In its second week, the film would lose 56 theatres and 52% of its opening weekend audience, falling all the way to 13th place with a gross of only $1.25m. By week three, the movie would move to dollar houses, and trudge along for several more months, until it closed in the middle of summer with only $5.55m in the till.   In the late 1970s and early 1980s, writer/director Jeremy Paul Kagan had directed and occasionally written several big ticket movies, including the 1977 Henry Winkler drama Heroes, which also starred Sally Field and, in his first post-Star Wars movie, Harrison Ford, and the 1985 Meredith Salinger/John Cusack adventure film The Journey of Natty Gann. Which makes his Natty Gann follow up, Big Man on Campus, such a head scratcher.   A modern adaptation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Big Man on Campus was written by Allan Katz, who had been working in television for nearly twenty years writing for and producing shows like All in the Family, Sanford and Son, The Mary Tyler Moore Show and MASH. Katz would also star in the movie as the titular hunchback, even though he had never once acted on any of his shows. But at least he had a good cast supporting him, including Gerrit Graham, Melora Hardin, Jessica Harper, Tom Skerritt, and Cindy Williams.   I can only find one playdate for the film ever, in Los Angeles at the American Cinematheque in March 1989, so while this mostly qualifies as a direct to video release, I feel compelled to at least give it a token mention here.   Have you ever heard of a movie called The Fruit Machine? Of course you haven't, because that's a horrible name for a movie, no matter what it's about. When Vestron acquired this British drama about young gay men who go on the run after they witness a murder, the first thing they did was change the title to Wonderland. Not that Wonderland gives you any more of an idea of what the movie is about than The Fruit Machine. But, whatever.   Today, the movie has two things going for it. One, an early role for Robbie Coltrane, playing a transvestite who operates a nightclub for gay men and transvestites called, you guessed it, The Fruit Machine. Second, the musical score was written by Hans Zimmer, in one of his earliest film jobs. Ironically, Wonderland would be the the third movie scored by Hans Zimmer to be released by Vestron in a four month period, after Burning Secret and Paperhouse.   Wonderland would open at the Quad Cinemas in New York City on April 28th, to poor reviews but a decent $11,500 opening weekend. But the film would not be able to maintain much of an audience, and after five weeks, Wonderland was out of the Quad Cinemas, never to play another theatre in America, with just $50k in the till.   Ken Russell's third and final film in his contract with Vestron was The Rainbow, an adaptation of a 1915 novel by D.H. Lawrence, whose 1920 novel Women in Love had been adapted by Russell in 1969. Glenda Jackson, who had won the Academy Award for her role in Women in Love, here plays the mother of the character she played in the other film. Here, she co-stars with Sammi Davis as Ursala, the younger sister of Jackson's Women in Love character, who finds herself attracted to Anton, a young man in town, as well as her gym teacher Winifred.   As one would expect from Ken Russell, the supporting cast is top notch, including future Eighth Doctor Paul McGann, regular Russell collaborator Christopher Gable, and Blowup star David Hemmings. The film would open at the Paris Theatre in New York City on May 5th, where it would gross a very good $22k, spurred on by great reviews from most of the city's major critics, several of which noted the film to be Russell's best in a number of years. So it would be sad that the film would end up being the lowest grossing of the three films he'd make with Vestron, only earning a total of $444k after three months in mostly single playdates in major markets.   In 1985, Geena Davis and Jeff Goldblum would work together on a forgettable horror comedy film called Transylvania 6-5000, whose name was a pun on a popular 1940 song recorded by Glenn Miller. In 1986, the pair would work together again in David Cronenberg's amazing remake of the cheesy 1950s horror film The Fly. In late 1987, shortly after the pair married, they would work together for a third time, on another comedy, and on a movie that was this time based on an actual song.    Earth Girls Are Easy was the name of a song that appeared on comedian Julie Brown's 1984 EP Goddess in Progress, and was originally developed as a movie at Warner Brothers Studio. The studio would get cold feet when Absolute Beginners, the big British musical directed by music video director Julien Temple, failed big time everywhere in the world except for the UK. Temple was slated to direct Earth Girls Are Easy, and Brown, as the co-writer and co-star of the film, was committed to the filmmaker, even if it meant Warners putting the film into turnaround.   Which they did, in 1986.   It would take nearly a year to get the project back on track, after being rejected by every other major studio and production company in Hollywood, until the French banking giant Credit Lyonnais agree to finance the film, provided they could cut the budget from $14m to $10m, and if the filmmakers could make a distribution deal with the bank's preferred distributor, the then newly-formed DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group.   The film, about a manicurist in Los Angeles who helps three aliens blend into human culture after they accidentally crash land their spaceship into her pool, would begin production in Los Angeles in October 1987. Davis played the manicurist, and Goldblum one of the aliens, alongside Damon Wayans and Jim Carrey, while the remaining cast would include a number of great comedic actors like MASH's Larry Linville, Michael McKean, Rick Overton, and Charles Rocket, as well as Los Angeles media personality Angelyne as basically herself.   While the film was nearing completion in early 1988, the DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group would go out of business, leaving Credit Lyonnais in need of a new distributor for their investment. But after Temple turned in his first cut of the film, Credit Lyonnais would send Temple back into his editing bay, where he and his team would spend nearly another five months  winnowing out various scenes and completely excising a big and expensive musical number based on one of the other songs on Brown's 1984 EP, I Like ‘Em Big and Stupid, because it just didn't work for the film. Additional scenes would be shot, and the budget would end up being $11m.    The film would have its premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in September 1988, and attract attention from a number of distributors including MGM/UA, New World Pictures and Twentieth Century-Fox, but Vestron would end up putting in the winning bid.   The film would originally be set for a February 1989 release, but would get delayed until May 12th. When it finally opened on 317 screens in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philly, San Francisco, Toronto and Washington DC, the film would gross $893k, putting in twelfth place for the weekend, but its per screen average would be the fourth best amongst the films in the top twenty. The film would fall one place in its second week,  losing 35% of its opening weekend audience, grossing $577k. The film would slowly hemorrhage theatres and box office until the plug was pulled in mid-July with only $3.9m in tickets sold.   The sole lasting legacy of the film is that Damon Wayans enjoyed working so much with Jim Carrey that when Damon's brother Kenan Ivory Wayans was putting together a new comedy television show together thanks to the success of his movie I'm Gonna Get You Sucka, Damon would get his brother to give Carrey a chance. In Living Color would make Carrey and the Wayans Brothers stars, and would change the course of comedy. So there's that…   In late June, the Lightning Pictures imprint would release their first movie in nearly two years, Far From Home. The film starred the then-fourteen year old Drew Barrymore as a young girl traveling cross country with her father, who get stuck in a small desert town in Nevada on their way to back to Los Angeles, who must deal with some very strange characters in the trailer park they're staying in, as they slowly discover nothing is as it's supposed to be. Matt Frewer, Max Headroom himself, plays the dad, who must protect his daughter while he figures out how to get the hell out of town alive.   Truth be told, the movie sucks, and it's really creepy in how it sexualizes Barrymore, but there's one hell of a great supporting cast doing their best to keep the joint from totally stinking the place up. Richard Masur, Academy Award nominee Susan Tyrell, Anthony Rapp from Adventures in Babysitting, Jennifer Tilly, and beloved character actor Dick Miller. When Vestron opened the film in four theatres in third-tier regions on June 30th, it was little surprise the film got some very bad notices, although one unnamed reviewer for Variety felt the need to note that Barrymore, who again was only fourteen at the time, had “a baby face, dreamy eyes and a playboy model's body.” The film would gross just $3,763 in its first and only weekend in theatres.   But that wasn't even the worst news of the week for Vestron.   On the same day as they opened Far From Home, Vestron had been informed by Security Pacific Bank in Los Angeles that the $100 million line of credit the company had with them was being terminated. 140 of the approximately 300 Vestron staff members, mostly from the Los Angeles office, were let go, including the President of Production, the Senior Vice President of Marketing and Distribution, and the Vice President of Publicity and Promotion. While Vestron Video would continue for a while, in large part thanks to a $15.7m payoff during a dispute over home video ownership rights to the 1986 Best Picture winner Platoon, the theatrical distribution unit was effectively dead. Some movies, including the Fred Savage/Howie Mandel comedy Little Monsters, the Harry Dean Stanton-led comedy Twister, and the Kathryn Bigelow-directed action thriller Blue Steel with Jamie Lee Curtis, would be sold off to other companies, but the titles left behind would see their planned theatrical releases cancelled and eventually be released direct to video.   Thanks to some of the legacy titles in their video catalog, including Dirty Dancing, Vestron would be able to stave off the inevitable, but in January 1991, the company would file for bankruptcy, their final film being the Stan Winston-directed fantasy buddy comedy The Adventures of a Gnome named Gnorm. Filmed in 1988 as Upward, the film featured Anthony Michael Hall as an Los Angeles Police Detective who has to team up with a gnome, a puppet created by Winston, the effects wizard who also directed the film, to solve a murder. For Winston, it was deja vu all over again, as his previous directorial effort, Pumpkinhead, found itself in limbo for a while when its distributor, the DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group, filed for bankruptcy in 1987 before they could release that film.   In bankruptcy court, Live Entertainment, partially owned by 1990s mega movie production company Carolco Pictures, would purchase all of Vestron's assets for $24m. Live used the assets as collateral to secure a line of credit from industry friendly banks, so they could start their own production and distribution company, of which their only moment of note was helping to finance Reservoir Dogs when no one else would.   Eventually, Live Entertainment would be sold off to Bain Capital, a private investment firm co-founded by Mitt Romney, in 1997, and they would rebrand Live as Artisan Entertainment. Artisan today is best known as the little independent distributor of The Blair Witch Project, but they also would enter into an agreement with Marvel Comics to make movies for 15 of their characters, including Ant-Man, Black Panther, Deadpool, Iron Fist, Longshot, Morbius, Mort the Dead Teenager, and the Power Pack.   Artisan would produce two movies based on Marvel characters, Man-Thing and The Punisher, although neither of those films would be released by Artisan. Artisan would declare bankruptcy in 2003, and Marvel would be one of the companies to place a bid for them. Lionsgate would end up becoming the winning bidder for Artisan's assets, which is how the vast majority of Vestron titles are now owned by a company that didn't even exist when Vestron closed shop.   Today, Lionsgate is the owner of the assets of a number of the companies we've spoken about on this podcast in the past, and will be talking about in the future, including Crown International, the DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group, Embassy Pictures, and New World Pictures. And it's also a major reason why so many of the movies we discuss in these episodes looking back at past companies are completely unknown today. As big as Lionsgate is, with nearly $3.6 billion in revenue in 2022, they aren't going to be able to keep up with the chain of ownership for every movies from every company they've purchased, and they're not going to put the money in to the movies that are barely remembered today. The Film Foundation, the non-profit organization co-founded by Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, which is dedicated to film preservation, estimates the average cost to do a photochemical restoration of a color feature with sound to between $80,000 to $450,000 dollars, not including the cost of a 2k or 4k digital scan. I'm going to have a link in the show notes on our website at The80sMoviePodcast.com to a November 2018 article from the Science History Institute about the process of restoring films. It's not a long read, but it's a fascinating read. I hope you'll check it out.   So there you have it, the end of the line for Vestron Pictures, and many of the movies they helped to make and distribute, most of which you cannot find today in any form.   Thank you for listening.   We'll talk again next week when Episode 105, on the 1985 teen comedy O.C. and Stiggs, directed by Robert Altman, will be discussed.   Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about the movies we covered this episode.   The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.   Thank you again.   Good night.

JAC's Patreon pick this week is the 1988/89 movie Earth Girls Are Easy. Written by Julie Brown, directed by Julien Temple, this stars Geena Davis, Jim Carrey, Damon Wayans, Jeff Goldblum, Julie Brown. This musical sci-fi adventure is sure to have Chris gushing. If you enjoy the show we have a Patreon, become a supporter. www.patreon.com/thevhsstrikesback Plot Summary: Three furry (and funny) aliens travel around the universe in a spaceship and receive a broadcast showing human females. They are fascinated by these shapely creatures and discover that the broadcast came from Southern California on Earth. Meanwhile, Valley girl Valerie Gail feels her cold fiancé Dr. Ted Gallagher is slipping away and decides to seduce him. Instead, she catches him cheating on her with a nurse, throws him out, smashes his things and refuses to see him again. The aliens' spaceship crash lands in Valerie's swimming pool - putting a decided damper on her future wedding plans in Las Vegas. She brings them into her home; and the aliens prove to be quick learners and absorb American popular culture and language through television. thevhsstrikesback@gmail.com https://linktr.ee/vhsstrikesback --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/thevhsstrikesback/support

Wilko Johnson, the Dr Feelgood guitarist with the eyes of a killer and the legs of a Riverdancer, died last November, which sent Aidan and Graham back to his previous obituary. Made as the pub rock pioneer fought an apparently terminal cancer, The Ecstasy of Wilko Johnson is less a rock documentary and more a fable about life, death and the creative spirit - a typically modest affair, then, from Julien Temple. Temple, perhaps the ultimate Pop Screen director, is not new to these shores, but our hosts quickly discover this might be the Julien Tempest film ever made. Along the way, we unpick the film's myriad allusions to cinema, poetry and astronomy, as well as discussing Temple's previous attempt at chronicling Dr Feelgood in Oil City Confidential. It's a magical film that definitely isn't just for Wilko fans. Look, the film's about cancer so I'm not going to make a joke here, I'll cut to the chase - you get so much more on the Geek Show Patreon, from our brand new movie miscellany podcast Last Night..., to two classic Doctor Who reviews a week from Graham. There's also Unseen Asia, in which Rob champions Asian films that lack a UK distributor, and a monthly bonus episode of this very show - the last one, a spoiler special on Glass Onion, may be our best yet. Follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook for more. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/pop-screen/message

It's the second of our three "Lost Episodes," and again I think we've covered all of the topics that we did the first time. The downside is that Sean wasn't feeling well when we did this re-record, and you can hear he's missing a little of his usual zip. But don't let that stop you from enjoying our peek at a pair of musicals that have David Bowie in them, and in a singing part, besides. Both of these films are from 1986. Our first entry is Absolute Beginners, directed by Julien Temple. It's an ambitious and enoyable film that somehow didn't catch on at the box office, but don't let that stop you from checking it out. Then, stay tuned for Part 2, when we spend some time in the Labyrinth. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wordsandmovies/support

In this half of the episode we take a look at Inside Llewyn Davis, written and directed by the Coen Brothers. In this case we have a (probably circular) story that takes place shortly before Bob Dylan first gained notoriety in the Greenwich Village area. Llewyn (Oscar Isaac) was once half of a folk duo, but now he's striking out on his own, for reasons which become clear as the film progresses. It's a dark comedy with a lot of interesting coincidences, as Coen Brothers films are wont to be. But check it out; you won't be disappointed. COMING ATTRACTIONS: Episode 46 is the second of our three "Lost Episodes"; that is, they're episodes that we recorded that somehow disappeared from the hard drive. This one focuses on a pair of musical films, both from 1986, in which David Bowie plays a villainous role: first up is Absolute Beginners, directed by Julien Temple. Then in Part 2 we take you into the Labyrinth, directed by Jim Henson. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wordsandmovies/support

Alex and Ryan continue their conversation with Oscar nominated Film and Television producer Sofia Sondervan, who has produced for ContentFilm, Pressman Film Corp, Sony Music and most recently Dutch Tilt Film. The film we cover is Contempt (1963) by Jean-Luc Goddard. A native of The Netherlands, Sofia graduated with honors from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts with a BFA in Film and Television. As head of Production for ContentFilm she produced the feature films The Hebrew Hammer, Rick, The King, and the acclaimed Party Monster starring Macaulay Culkin, and Seth Green. As the head of Sony Music Film she produced Cadillac Records with Jeffrey Wright and Beyonce Knowles which was nominated for a Golden Globe, eight NAACP image awards, and won Best Picture at the Black Real Awards. Sofia produced TriStar's Feel The Noise with Jennifer Lopez and acquired the award-winning Ghosts of Cite Soleil directed by Asger Leth, The Future Is Unwritten by Julien Temple, and East Of Havana produced by Charlize Theron. In 2020 Sofia produced the Academy Award nominated The Letter Room by Elvira Lind, staring Oscar Isaac and Alia Shawcat (official selection for the Telluride, Tribeca, and Palm Springs Film Festivals). Additionally, Sofia Sondervan is a member of the Producers Guild of America and New York Women in Film as well as an Adjunct Instructor at her alma mater, Producing in the Undergraduate and Graduate Departments of the New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Sofia Sondervan IMDB NYU Tisch Twitter Dutch Films IG Next Chapter Podcasts presents How I Got Greenlit, a new podcast hosted by the Creator of HBO's Project Greenlight Alex Keledjian and Emmy Award Winning Producer Ryan Gibson, exploring how our favorite films got made and how they made our favorite filmmakers. Alex Keledjian Alex Keledjian is the creator of Project Greenlight, a documentary television series where executive producers Matt Damon and Ben Affleck gave first-time filmmakers a chance to direct their first feature film. In 2018, Alex wrote and directed the film High Voltage starring David Arquette and Luke Wilson. Ryan Gibson Ryan Gibson is an Emmy-award winning producer of such films as the critically acclaimed Woe and the upcoming film Slotherhouse. He has worked for over twenty years in all aspects of film development and production. HBO Max will stream the latest season of the Emmy-nominated TV series Project Greenlight from executive producer Issa Rae and Miramax Television in January 2023. How I Got Greenlit Instagram Twitter Podlink Credits Alex Keledjian, Host Ryan Gibson, Host Edgar Camey, Audio Editor Pete Musto, Editor Robert Cappadona, Producer Jeremiah Tittle, Producer Experience more of How I Got Greenlit via ncpodcasts.com For guest inquiries, sponsorships, and all other magnificent concerns, please reach How I Got Greenlit via howIgotgreenlit@gmail.com For inquiries and more information on Next Chapter Podcasts info@ncpodcasts.com New episodes go live every Tuesday. Please subscribe, rate & review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, wherever you listen to podcasts.

Our guest this week is Oscar nominated Film and Television producer Sofia Sondervan, who has produced for ContentFilm, Pressman Film Corp, Sony Music and most recently Dutch Tilt Film. A native of The Netherlands, Sofia graduated with honors from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts with a BFA in Film and Television. As head of Production for ContentFilm she produced the feature films The Hebrew Hammer, Rick, The King, and the acclaimed Party Monster starring Macaulay Culkin, and Seth Green. As the head of Sony Music Film she produced Cadillac Records with Jeffrey Wright and Beyonce Knowles which was nominated for a Golden Globe, eight NAACP image awards, and won Best Picture at the Black Real Awards. Sofia produced TriStar's Feel The Noise with Jennifer Lopez and acquired the award-winning Ghosts of Cite Soleil directed by Asger Leth, The Future Is Unwritten by Julien Temple, and East Of Havana produced by Charlize Theron. In 2020 Sofia produced the Academy Award nominated The Letter Room by Elvira Lind, staring Oscar Isaac and Alia Shawcat (official selection for the Telluride, Tribeca, and Palm Springs Film Festivals). Additionally, Sofia Sondervan is a member of the Producers Guild of America and New York Women in Film as well as an Adjunct Instructor at her alma mater, Producing in the Undergraduate and Graduate Departments of the New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Sofia Sondervan IMDB NYU Tisch Twitter Dutch Films IG Next Chapter Podcasts presents How I Got Greenlit, a new podcast hosted by the Creator of HBO's Project Greenlight Alex Keledjian and Emmy Award Winning Producer Ryan Gibson, exploring how our favorite films got made and how they made our favorite filmmakers. Alex Keledjian Alex Keledjian is the creator of Project Greenlight, a documentary television series where executive producers Matt Damon and Ben Affleck gave first-time filmmakers a chance to direct their first feature film. In 2018, Alex wrote and directed the film High Voltage starring David Arquette and Luke Wilson. Ryan Gibson Ryan Gibson is an Emmy-award winning producer of such films as the critically acclaimed Woe and the upcoming film Slotherhouse. He has worked for over twenty years in all aspects of film development and production. HBO Max will stream the latest season of the Emmy-nominated TV series Project Greenlight from executive producer Issa Rae and Miramax Television in January 2023. How I Got Greenlit Instagram Twitter Podlink Credits Alex Keledjian, Host Ryan Gibson, Host Edgar Camey, Audio Editor Pete Musto, Editor Robert Cappadona, Producer Jeremiah Tittle, Producer Experience more of How I Got Greenlit via ncpodcasts.com For guest inquiries, sponsorships, and all other magnificent concerns, please reach How I Got Greenlit via howIgotgreenlit@gmail.com For inquiries and more information on Next Chapter Podcasts info@ncpodcasts.com New episodes go live every Tuesday. Please subscribe, rate & review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, wherever you listen to podcasts.

In this episode, Andy and Stephanie discuss blonde twinks and baby Jim Carrey as they review Julien Temple's EARTH GIRLS ARE EASY. Andy pines for Rocky Horror Picture Show and Stephanie needs a Valium (or five). Plus: a live reading of Julie Brown's lyrics. Reading Rec: Earth Girls are EasyWatching Rec: Angelyne, on Peacock

Now that we've covered Pistol, here's a very much pre-Pistol biography of The Sex Pistols from inside their own camp, an apparent collaboration between manager Malcolm McLaren and director Julien Temple who tell the almost-sort of-true story of what really might have happened but probably didn't

This week, Pop Screen is warming up its fingers to peruse the lexicon of love with Mantrap, a short film starring ABC - but mostly their lead singer Martin Fry - and directed by Pop Screen's patron saint Julien Temple. Once again, we're joined by Gav Smith from the very fine My Favourite Film podcast, as he takes on his most challenging assignment to date - persuading Graham that early '80s synth pop is good, actually. Along the way, we discuss the film's romantic lead Lisa Vanderpump and her later career on reality TV, the wayward career of the prolific Temple and whether The Fast Show has rendered jazz inherently 'nice'. If this strikes you as a fairly obscure choice of film even for our podcast, you're not wrong - this is the first, and no doubt last, film we'll cover that was originally released on Laserdisc... If you don't want us to have to run away with a touring New Romantic band in order to make ends meet, you can support us on Patreon where you'll also get a plethora of articles about forgotten Asian cinema, classic Doctor Who, bonus episodes of this show and deep dives on the videogame industry. Follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook for more information. #popscreen #moviereviews #abc #mantrap #martinfry #julientemple #lisavanderpump

This week, Kirk and Paul discuss Andrew Gray's real name, Julien Temple's real daughter, the real online game Heardle, real MTV programming and the future of "The Real World Homecoming." Kirk plays the laser round then tries to build his new streak in the music trivia quiz.

Hi there!! Who's my guest for this episode? Well, he is an actor, musician and all round good guy, Mr Lorne MacFadyen!!!!! I have known Lorne since my teen years and watched with pride as his star has risen over the past few years! He has been in such things as BBC's Vigil, Ken Loach's The Angel's Share and he even plays Julien Temple in the new programme on Disney+ Pistol!!!!   This was an absolute joy and I hope you love this chat as much as I did.   Check out the Apple Music Playlist for today's episode here: https://music.apple.com/gb/playlist/lorne-macfadyens-4saad-playlist/pl.u-zPyL1v5FZDz8mK   Check out Pistol on Disney+, Vigil on the iPlayer, Tina and Bobby on Britbox, you know what, just google Lorne MacFadyen and you will get a whole host of amazing acting from him.     

Follow us on Patreon at: patreon.com/andalmoststarring Our June-a Davis Month kicks off with the delightfully campy comedy-musical Earth Girls are Easy! Which brat-pack regular turned down Valerie? Which two actors in the film wound up swapping roles with each other? And who else clocked that vegetable oil standing in as sensual oil? Also – Jeff gets a bad case of wig blindness, and we go down a Corey Feldman-centric IMDB user review wormhole!   Earth Girls are Easy stars Geena Davis, Jeff Goldblum, Jim Carrey, Damon Wayans, Julie Brown, Charles Rocket, Michael McKean, and Angelyne; directed by Julien Temple     Follow the Podcast: On Instagram: @andalmoststarring  Have a film you'd love for us to cover? E-mail us at andalmoststarring@gmail.com   www.andalmoststarring.com   

Team Obscura (re)returns after a month long hiatus due to some health/life stuff to cover the 1989 movie Earth Girls Are Easy! The movie is a musical science fiction romantic comedy that was directed by Julien Temple and follows Geena Davis as a bride-to-be as she navigates adultery, the existence of alien life, and other generally rom-com/sci fi things in a highly B-moviefied version of Los Angeles. The film also features Jim Carrey, Jeff Goldblum and Damon Waynes. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/mediaobscura/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/mediaobscura/support

Nate and Justin discuss two very different takes on the Sex Pistols story, both films directed by Julien Temple.Have a question or a suggestion for a topic or person for Nate to interview? Email letitrollpodcast@gmail.comFollow us on Twitter.Follow us on Facebook.Part of Pantheon Podcasts

Nate and Justin discuss two very different takes on the Sex Pistols story, both films directed by Julien Temple.Have a question or a suggestion for a topic or person for Nate to interview? Email letitrollpodcast@gmail.comFollow us on Twitter.Follow us on Facebook.Part of Pantheon Podcasts

After making one of the definitive rock biopics with Sid & Nancy, Alex Cox was hired to document The Pogues, Joe Strummer and Elvis Costello as they toured Nicaragua. When it was decided that sending a bunch of rock stars to tour a country which had recently been at war was a bad idea, Cox made Straight to Hell instead, a spaghetti Western parody with Strummer as the leader of a group of bank robbers whose attempted getaway lands them in a sinister town ruled by a coffee-addicted bandit gang played by the Pogues. It sounds like... well, it sounds like something, god knows what, and this week Mark Cunliffe of We Are Cult joins Graham to pick over the aftermath. As well as the surpassingly silly film that resulted from all this chaos, there's also room to talk about the hard-drinking British character actor Dudley Sutton, Kathy Burke's position as Greatest Living Englishwoman, and the changing fortunes of British film magazines as measured through the quality of their classified ads. If you want to help us feed our debilitating coffee addiction, you can donate to our Patreon, where tomorrow we'll be releasing an exclusive follow-up to this episode, with Mark returning to review Julien Temple's documentary Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds With Shane MacGowan. Don't forget to follow us on social media too - we're on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. #popscreen #moviereview #straighttohell #alexcox #joestrummer #spaghettiwestern #thepogues #shanemacgowan #kathyburke #edwardtudorpole #courtneylove #elviscostello #gracejones

In mid-70's London, the Sex Pistols released their first and only album, "Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols".After the controversy, the legal battles, and the arguments, we're left with one of the best rock-n-roll albums ever.  Mick and the Phatman talk about the band, where they came from, and why the album is so great.References: Uluru, Red Sands Motel, Mr Mercedes, Chrissie Hynde, "I Shall Be Released", Santana, "Blessings and Miracles", Stevie Winwood, John Lydon, Johnny Rotten, Public Image Ltd, Glen Matlock, Sid Vicious, Bill Grundy, Julien Temple, "The Filth and the Fury",  Richard Branson, Malcolm McLaren, Jamie Reid, Graham Chapman Bob Dylan 30th AnniversaryNever Mind the BollocksBlessings and MiraclesBook:  "Anger is an Energy", John LydonContact UsIf you enjoy this podcast, share it with a friend who loves music. Or leave us a review and a rating (5-star?) to help our audience grow.  What do you think of the podcast? What would you like us to talk about? Ask questions, or even let us know if we got something wrong!! Follow us on Facebook Follow us  on Instagram Email us at: mickandthephatman@gmail.com

This week on THE MOVIE CONNECTION, we ask: What do a family of women navigating the domestic life of 19th century America, and a trio of horny aliens slumming the streets of 1980's LA, have in common? Jacob watched: "LITTLE WOMEN"(5:34) (Directed by, Greta Gerwig. Starring, Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh, Laura Dern...) KC watched "'EARTH GIRLS ARE EASY"(39:55) (Directed by, Julien Temple. Starring, Geena Davis, Jeff Goldblum, Julie Brown...) Talking points include: SOOOO many versions of "Little Women." 80's movies Feminist icons Time period movies Stage musicals and more! We have an email now! So, please send us questions, comments and feedback: movieconnectionpodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Instagram Check out more reviews by Jacob on Leterboxd Listen to us on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. Cover art by Austin Hillebrecht and KC Schwartz Opening and closing themes courtesy of TelevisionTunes.com

On today's episode of Art of the Cut, Steve chats with Niven Howie, ACE, about Netflix's latest fantasy series hit, Shadow and Bone. Niven started his career cutting high-end ads and music videos back in the 1980s, but was launched into feature films with Julien Temple's 1999 Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, which earned him a BAFTA nomination for Best Editing. Since then he's worked on a fantastic variety of major feature films and award-winning TV series. Thanks to Frame.io for their support of Art of the Cut and their pledge to keep this content coming your way. Read this interview and many others at blog.frame.io, where you'll also find expert guides, tutorials, and insights from veteran filmmakers across the film and TV industry.

Welcome back to Hard Labor and Money Splashes! In this episode, we begin our song-by-song review of The Rolling Stones 1983 album, Undercover, starting with the lead single and title track, "Undercover (of the Night). Released in the fall of 1983, the song is both a political protest anthem disguised as a rocker AND a Top Ten hit with a great dance groove. The song's accompanying video (shot by Julien Temple) was banned by many media outlets upon initial release, ostensibly for its violent content, but perhaps more for its unflinching depictions of political unrest in Central and South America? (And the United States' role in that unrest?) Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MoneySplashes Reach out to us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/moneysplashes/ Drop us an email at: hardlabormoneysplashes@gmail.com Check out our YouTube channel: Hard Labor and Money Splashes - YouTube

Mike speaks with director Julien Temple (Earth Girls are Easy) about his latest documentary film, Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan. Produced by Johnny Depp, it's a documentary about the lead singer of The Pogues and his relationship to his native Ireland.Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan is now available on DVD and On Demand.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Paul Holloway's second guest on Fuzzcast is Wilko Johnson. Wilko made his name as guitar player and songwriter with Dr Feelgood. Hailing out of Canvey Island the band are widely acknowledged as the best band on London's pub rock scene in the mid 70's which heavily influenced the birth of punk rock. The band were riding high after their live album Stupidity topped the UK charts in 1976 but Wilko left the Feelgood's after a spectacular bust up with frontman Lee Brilleaux whilst recording the band's fourth album Sneaking Suspicion the following year. Wilko was later invited to join the Blockheads by Ian Dury and recorded the Laughter album with the band. During his time with the Blockheads Wilko formed a friendship with bass player Norman Watt-Roy who still plays in his 3 piece band today together with drummer Dylan Howe. There was a resurge in interest in the Feelgood's in 2009 when Julien Temple released his excellent documentary film, Oil City Confidential. On the back of the film Wilko landed his first acting role with a part in Game of Thorns as House Lancaster executioner See Ilyn Payne. In 2013 Wilko was diagnosed with terminal cancer and given less than a year to live. He refused chemopathy and crammed into what he thought was his last year; trips to Japan, a farewell tour, recording a best selling album with Roger Daltry and making another film The Ecstasy of Wilko Johnson with Julien Temple about his own mortality. However, a fan who happened to be a cancer specialist perseuded Wilko to take a second opinion and Wilko underwent a major operation which cured him from cancer. In 2016 Wilko published his autobiography Don't You Leave Me Here and in 2018 he released Blow Your MInd, an album of new material. Wilko was still gigging until Covid stuck.

Adam enjoys some festive waffle cake with his old friend Joe Cornish.Conversation recorded remotely on 19th December 2020.Thanks to Séamus Murphy-Mitchell for production support and to Matt Lamont for additional conversation editing. Matt's recently set up his own podcast company, called PodMonkey. If any of you podcats have a podcast that needs making then get in touch via www.podmonkey.co.ukAdam Buxton Podcast artwork by Helen Green https://helengreenillustration.com/Thanks to Harry & Cal from Hooton Tennis Club for their jingle.RELATED LINKSADAM BUXTON'S RAMBLE BOOK (AUDIOBOOK) (2020, AUDIBLE)ADAM BUXTON'S RAMBLE BOOK (HARDBACK) (WATERSTONES)THE STAVES - GOOD WOMAN PLAYLIST (SPOTIFY PLAYLIST)THE STAVES - I'M ON FIRE (BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN COVER) (2015, YOUTUBE)JOE'S INSTAGRAM PAGEYour one stop shop for J-Corn news (including details of Joe's latest project for Netflix) and a lot of old Adam and Joe bits and pieces and assorted juvenilia.NATIVE INSTRUMENTS VSTsMARIAN KEYES ON TAKING CARE OF YOURSELF AT CHRISTMAS (2019, YOUTUBE)If you find Christmas one of the most stressful and lonely times of the year, here's a few words of support from writer Marian Keyes.NEVER MIND THE BAUBLES - THE PISTOLS AT CHRISTMAS (Directed by Julien Temple) (2013, YOUTUBE)THE STAVES (WITH ADAM BUXTON) - CHRISTMAS CORNBALLS (2020, SOUNDCLOUD)Based on One More Sleep Til Christmas by Paul Williams from The Muppets Christmas CarolADAM'S DREAM SONG - OPENING NIGHTMARE (2020, SOUNDCLOUD)JOE'S DREAM SONG - DEMENTED DREAMS (2020, SOUNDLCOUD)THE CROWN - SPLASH PREMIERE (2020, SOUNDCLOUD)THE CROWN - LIVE AID (2020, SOUNDCLOUD)

Sigourney Weaver talks to us about starring in the thoughtful New York-set coming of age film about ambition and talent, My Salinger Year, and rock and roll documentary maker Julien Temple has made a new film about one of the most significant figures in Irish music.

Sigourney Weaver talks to us about starring in the thoughtful New York-set coming of age film about ambition and talent, My Salinger Year, and rock and roll documentary maker Julien Temple has made a new film about one of the most significant figures in Irish music.

1990 - A new decade dawns and with it comes a genre-bursting variety of pop opportunities. Dance, Indie....Indie dance!Whilst the top of the artist album charts celebrated classic artists such as Phil Collins, Elton John and the Carpenters, the first full year of the compilation chart was exploding with an eclectic mix of dance -and the Top 40 singles chart was becoming increasingly exciting, varied and fast moving as the decade took shape - and NOW17 took a great snapshot of it all!Joining me for this episode is Michael Mulligan. Michael has made a name for himself working in all manner of music retail, lending his expertise as a consultant for record labels and mining the archives for overlooked gems. He is also the author responsible for books including 'The Story of NOW in 100 artists', published to celebrate, not surprisingly,  the release of NOW 100. And most recently, Michael contributed the insightfully crafted sleeve notes to the soundtrack reissue of Julien Temple's 1986 film adaptation of Absolute Beginners.So, come back to Spring/Summer 1990 and celebrate how the decade memorably kicked off. Expect starring roles from Erasure, Depeche Mode, Candy Flip, The Charlatans, Beats International, Cliff, Des Lynam(!) and why Sydney Youngblood won't be returning our calls! https://backtonow.music.blog/ See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.